
At Facebook, Creating Empathy Among Cyberbullying - mikeleeorg
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/23/fashion/Facebook-Arturo-Bejar-Creating-Empathy-Among-Cyberbullying.html
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diminoten
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!"

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chipsy
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.

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

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swalsh
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"

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pyrocat
Also: why there is no "dislike" button

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

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anigbrowl
_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?

