It is widely held that people are meaner on the internet than in person. Now Facebook is attempting to teach its users how to play nice.
Its newly updated safety centre, including its “bullying prevention hub” are central to its strategy to improve the quality of discourse on the platform – for the sake of its future as much as for its users’ experience.
“If people don’t __have a positive experience, they’re not going to keep using Facebook, so safety is actually integral to everything we do,” says Mia Garlick, director of policy and communications for the platform in the Australia-Pacific region.
Asked if she has statistics that show whether disillusioned users are closing their accounts, Garlick says no – somewhat surprisingly, given the volume of data that Facebook collects. It certainly records growth: in its third quarter report for 2016, Facebook had 1.79 billion monthly active users, an increase of 16% year-on-year. There are now 15 million Australians active on Facebook, 62.5% of the total population.
At that size, it’s an unwieldy community, encompassing a wide range of investment: for example, it has about 600,000 fewer daily active users than those who log in monthly. Facebook’s hope is that its new resources will equip them with the knowledge and resources they need to be a somewhat self-policing community.
Developed in tandem with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence in 2013, the bullying prevention Hub is a website, linked to but separate from Facebook’s homepage. Newly updated to put greater focus on video, it delivers support for teenagers, parents and educators on how to prevent and respond to online abuse.
Much of the advice seems obvious. The hub advises teenagers to remember “that bullying is never your fault, and it can happen to anyone”. If your child is being bullied, “try to stay calm”. And if you are unsure, you can download a document that explains “What is bullying?”
The separate safety centre is geared towards explaining Facebook-specific tools, resources and policies, as well as advice as to how to apply them: “Before you share, ask yourself: could somebody use this to hurt me?”
Garlick says there is a generation gap that Facebook must help its users bridge. Parents, in particular, need to be confident about using the platform to educate their children about the risks.
“Young people are very sophisticated about how they use technology, but sometimes they haven’t actually gone through all of the thought processes that they should.”
But the usefulness of the resources depend on people knowing they exist and how to find them, which Garlick says is a “challenge”. She says instructional videos are posted to Facebook’s regional branded pages, and it has “reached out” to educational partners in the hope that they will share it within their networks.
If Facebook wanted all 1.8 billion monthly users to be aware of the hub, it could simply push it out to them top of their news feeds – where the network on occasion posts messages as anodyne as the hope that users __have a “fun and happy” summer.
And it does – occasionally.
“The thing to keep in mind is that the vast majority of conversations and interactions on our platform are really, really positive,” Garlick says. She says Facebook’s tools and resources are about empowering users to look after themselves, and to encourage them to exercise control over their interactions on the platform.
One relatively recent addition is the security checkup, which explains who can see your posts and how to restrict their access, step by step. It’s straightforward for irregular Facebook users to grasp but in-depth enough to bring value to the confident ones.
Garlick says 4,000 privacy checkups are carried out on the site each day. Even she benefited from the tool, using it to do “a bit of spring cleaning” of the apps she had used since 2007.
Self-sufficiency is a cornerstone of Facebook’s reporting process, which asks that users flag objectionable material for review against its community standards – still the best tool the platform has for ruling what is and is not acceptable.
Automation is used to prevent malware and crack down on fake accounts, and some software is used for child exploitation images and, soon, extremist content. But Garlick says calls about individual posts that “go through the flow” are made on a case-by-case basis, by human moderators.
“It’s very hard to understand nuance if you’re a machine.”
Managing those 1.8 billion users, three-quarters from outside the US, is not easy for a human. The community standards are deliberately broad, but there are nonetheless some lines in the sand that users keep coming up against. Nipples – sometimes sexual, often not – are one of the recurring sticking points.
“Don’t even get me started,” says Garlick, somewhat ruefully. “Some of the conversations I have around nipples ... ”
In July Facebook removed a video posted by the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, that showed abuse in juvenile detention facilities, because it included child nudity. The ABC posted a new version with blurring.
There is a “pretty tough line” drawn around children in particular, Garlick says. “We get the majority of reports right.”
Allowing users control over their Facebook presence through the news tools helps them to “create and curate a positive experience”, she says.
It also helps foster a sense of ownership, maybe even of community. This seems to be top of mind for the platform. It has has started asking users: “How much does this post help you feel like you are part of a larger community on Facebook?” The possible answers range from “Not at all” to “Completely”.
But an integral part of community is support. If people feel equipped to have positive experiences on Facebook, maybe they will be more inclined to look out for it.
“You take care of your house,” Garlick says. “If somebody graffitied your front yard, you’d clean it up. It’s the same if people are saying stuff in your space on Facebook.”
