Podcasts Culture Radiolab The Trust Engineers

The Trust Engineers

Published: Feb. 24, 2023, 3 p.m.

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First aired in 2015, this is an episode about social media, and how, when we talk online, things can quickly go south. But do they have to? In the earlier days of Facebook, we met with a group of social engineers who were convinced that tiny changes in wording can make the online world a kinder, gentler place.\\xa0

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We just have to\\xa0 agree to be their lab rats.

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Because Facebook, or something like it, is where we share and like and gossip and gripe. And before we were as aware of its impact, Facebook had a laboratory of human behavior the likes of which we\\u2019d never seen. We got to peek into the work of Arturo Bejar and a team of researchers who were tweaking our online experience, to try to make the world a better place. And even now, just under a decade later, we\\u2019re still left wondering if that\\u2019s possible, or even a good idea.

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EPISODE CREDITS\\xa0

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Reported by - Andrew ZolliOriginal music and sound design contributed by - Mooninites

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REFERENCES:

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ArticlesAndrew Zolli\\u2019s blog post about Darwin\\u2019s Stickers (https://zpr.io/ZpMeUnRmVMgP) which highlights another one of these Facebook experiments that didn\\u2019t make it into the episode.

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BooksAndrew Zolli\\u2019s Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back\\xa0(https://zpr.io/7fYQ9iDYAQBu)Kate Crawford\'s Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence\\xa0(https://zpr.io/9rU5CGSit3W4)

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Leadership support for Radiolab\\u2019s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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