Radiolab - The Trust Engineers

When we talk online, things can go south fast. But they don’t have to. Today, we meet a group of social engineers who are convinced that tiny changes in wording can make the online world a kinder, gentler place. So long as we agree to be their lab rats. Ok, yeah, we’re talking about Facebook. Because Facebook, or something like it, is more and more the way we share and like, and gossip and gripe. And because it's so big, Facebook has a created a laboratory of human behavior the likes of which we’ve never seen. We peek into the work of Arturo Bejar and a team of researchers who are tweaking our online experience, bit by bit, to try to make the world a better place. And along the way we can’t help but wonder whether that’s possible, or even a good idea.

Duration: 32m
Broadcast on: 09 Feb 2015
Audio Format: other

Ok, yeah, we’re talking about Facebook. Because Facebook, or something like it, is more and more the way we share and like, and gossip and gripe. And because it's so big, Facebook has a created a laboratory of human behavior the likes of which we’ve never seen. We peek into the work of Arturo Bejar and a team of researchers who are tweaking our online experience, bit by bit, to try to make the world a better place. And along the way we can’t help but wonder whether that’s possible, or even a good idea.

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What it means by "reports" is this. Back in 2011, if you saw something on Facebook that really upset you, you could click a button to report it. You could tell Facebook to take it down, which from their perspective is a really important mechanism, because if you're Facebook, you don't want certain kinds of content on your site. You don't want nudity, you don't want drug use, hate speech, things like that. So a day or so after Christmas, Facebook engineers come back to work, and they

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