Trust Engineering
I listened to a repeat episode of Radio Lab where they rewinded to 2015 and the Facebook scandals of the time. In 2011, Facebook ran experiments on helping people request from each other to take down photos they didn’t like. They found that different text in the messages or the buttons had a different outcome.
The news cycle took this as Facebook being manipulative, which is reductive. Facebook was doing what I did a few years before when I was cold calling. In doing lead generation for a startup, I started with one script and would hone it overtime to see what would be effective in booking appointments.
People being involved in “experiments” seemed yucky but most of the yucky-ness could be a PR fiasco and how it was presented. This is not being apologetic for true breaches of trust that would later happen, but not just for optimizing messages to make people nicer to each other. We know what happens when they’re not.
The biggest of the sins was calling the group “Trust Engineering”. When I was in school, the term “engineering” was taught as being legally protected. The Professional Engineers of Ontario governed the use of the term and who could call themselves an engineer or what fields could be called “engineering”. In ‘merica, maybe there are more freedoms? You can call anything engineering, and people do.
“Social engineering”, “money engineering”, “life engineering” — anything non-technical engineering has an ick factor. The ick is that engineering is purposely trying to use methods to design for a particular outcome. In context other than technical, it comes out as manipulation.
Words matter when communicating ideas. Trust is “built”, money is “saved”, life is “lived”. Also, when external facing, better name your department as descriptively as you can. “Content monitoring and review” aligns better with what Facebook was doing.
