At Facebook, Creating Empathy Among Cyberbullying | Hacker News Reader

At Facebook, Creating Empathy Among Cyberbullying

nytimes.com

46 pointsmikeleeorg14 comments

I find it difficult to believe the number of people who claim to be "just making a joke" were honestly doing just that, and had no offensive motives.

Isn't that the classic response to offense? "I was just kidding!"

I'm guessing these folks were in CYA mode when they responded to these surveys. "Oh shit, Facebook is going to discipline me if I tell them I was being mean on purpose!"

In general, people experience an emotion first, take action based on the emotion, and then their brain covers up self-harmful reflections on the action by building a rationale for their action being appropriate. We can do this astonishingly quickly, enough so that other people will also believe that it was a reasoned action and not just an emotion.

This is definitely a phenomenon that has been around for a long time. From a certain epistolary novel published around seventy years ago I quote the following passage:

"If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is 'mean'; if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and twits his fellows with having been scored off, he is no longer 'mean' but a comical fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful— unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke."

It really is funny... to them. They don't expect it to be funny to the target.

I can't believe there is a team of 80 people at facebook to help people act nicer.

I believe i read once that facebook has highly correlated people's engagement when interactions are more or less positive. So it might make sense to have a team work on creating mechanisms that improve the interactions so they trend more positively. Though i'm sure its sold as facebook "just trying to make a difference"

Also: why there is no "dislike" button

Related: No down voting (for 90%+?) on HN.

You should, because there is.

I read it as an idiom to express surprise[0], not literal disbelief.

[0] http://www.phrasemix.com/phrases/i-cant-believe-someone-woul...

They work on a big gamut of things, including but not limited to protecting your account from getting hacked, helping you recover your account if you do, impersonations, spam, etc. It' s not just "help people act nicer" :)

I don't know about that. I'd think the account protection team would be larger than 80. What do I know?

I think this is a great sign- there have been so many stories of teenagers committing suicide from public ridicule on the Internet, FB is really helping their users by creating a safer and nicer place to exist online without fear of cyber bullying by taking this action and really devoting resources to save lives.

Interestingly, more often than not, the posts were not meant to hurt, but were jokes lost in digital translation. When Facebook asked people why they shared a post that hurt someone else, around 90 percent of respondents said they thought their friends would like the post or would think it was funny.

Even my dog knows the limits of that particular excuse. It's nice that Facebook is throwing some resources at this problem, but giving people stickers, really? Why not call in a linguistics expert like Deborah Tannen, or do some epidemiology-type modeling of meme transmission to see whether differently-freighted transmissions take different vectors around the network?

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