The Trust Engineers - RadioLab

Facebook and other online social media websites are changing the way we communicate with each other. While some use it to spread positive messages, just as many use it for gossip and to share their anger. On this episode of RadioLab, a group of social engineers from Facebook are looked at to see how they are changing this experience to make the world a better place.

These social engineers act as problem solvers for the users of Facebook. Their goal is to make the users of Facebook friendlier with one another. A major problem for this group arose in late 2011 when millions of Christmas photos were uploaded to the website. When there's that many photos being uploaded, there are complaints about the photos that go with it. The most common is that someone is featured in the photo, and they find it embarrassing. If a user asks Facebook to take a photo down, they must check a box saying why, and then a real person determines if the photo should be taken down or not.

The workers at Facebook didn't just want to take down a photo because one user thought it was embarrassing. They wanted to create a conversation between the person who posted, and the person who wants the photo removed. They created a message box containing a pre-written statement for when a complaint is filed. They have the option to send this message to the person asking them to have the picture taken down. The engineers found that users will opt to talk with the person 50% of the time when prompted. This was a good rate, but they wanted it higher.

To do this, they fiddled with the wording of the message to see what will get the highest use rate. Using the word "please" made the rate go up, while the word "sorry" made it go down. The engineers conduct experiments on Facebook users because it contains the best representation of the public all in one place. An example of an experiment was the "I voted" button users could click if they voted in the last Presidential election. Users who saw that their friends voted were 2% more likely to vote themselves. This doesn't sound like much, but it brought in 340,000 more votes.

The episode talked about the Media uproar when they found out Facebook users were essentially lab rats for social experiments. Personally, I have no problem with what these experimenters are doing. They're figuring out ways for us to be more positive, more social, and to cast votes. It sounds like they're doing more good for society than anything else.