Tackling Spats Over Disliked Facebook Posts

Tagged in an embarrassing photo? Hurt by an insensitive comment? Shocked by vulgar displays of what passes for humor? From Mumbai to Menlo Park, Facebook is swamped with complaints about “inappropriate” posts, each of which must be manually reviewed by an employee. Yet rather than take down the offending content, the social network has tapped the emotional intelligence of UC Berkeley psychologists, among other top minds, to resolve disputes over posts that don’t clearly violate the company’s community standards.

 

Logo: Facebook and Eric Olson of Process Type Foundry; Wikimedia Commons

And their efforts are paying off: “By working with experts in developmental psychology and the science of human emotion, we’re proud to see Facebook’s social resolution tools help, on average, 3.9 million people each week,” said Facebook spokesman Matt Steinfeld.

In its 10th year, Facebook is thriving with more than 1 billion active monthly users. But it’s also a magnet for uncomfortable interactions over everything from unflattering snapshots to cyber-bullying. That’s why the company’s engineers have teamed up with university scholars to create messaging tools to make the social network a safer and more empathetic space.

“Our driving mission is to make people feel more inclusive and tender towards each other because a culture – including an online community – that uses the full range of emotions is just healthier,” said Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.

Building a more ‘tender’ Facebook community

A neuroscientist, Simon-Thomas is on Facebook’s “compassion research team” along with UC Berkeley psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner. Among other things, they’ve helped tweak pop-up text and create emoticons to encourage Facebook users to communicate their “authentic” feelings about posts that do not fall into the categories  of bullying, hate speech or pornography, but are nonetheless upsetting to them.

UC Berkeley neuroscientist Emiliana Simon-Thomas has been embedded at Facebook as a member of the social network’s compassion research team

“It’s amazing how intimate Facebook can quickly get, and how the written word can be trouble,” said Keltner, who has helped to shape Facebook emoticons based on naturalist Charles Darwin’s study of how facial muscles are used to express emotions. “That’s why we’ve had to build in visuals that express the apologetic, the ironic, and all those emotions that you can’t convey in a smiley face or in words alone.”

Complicating this endeavor is that different cultures find different things funny or offensive.For example, “People who use Facebook in India are offended by different things, like a photo that mocks a favorite cricket player or Bollywood actor,” Simon-Thomas said. “They tend not to use Facebook as much for personal sharing.”