Of Facebook’s 7,185 employees, Arturo Bejar may have the most difficult job.
No, he is not responsible for increasing advertising revenue or keeping the website alive 24 hours a day. Mr. Bejar has a much more inscrutable task: teaching the site’s 1.3 billion users, especially its tens of millions of teenagers, how to be nice and respectful to one another.
Respectful? Online? Ha! That’s never going to happen. Everyone knows that social media is an unwinnable game of who can be meaner. If Mr. Bejar thinks he can make Facebook users nice, he is — to borrow a popular Facebook comment — just stupid!
But that kind of response is exactly what Mr. Bejar is counting on. As the director of engineering for the Facebook Protect and Care team, 80-strong, he believes that most users are not trying to be mean and that they will retract a comment (and even feel bad about it) if they realize it has caused someone harm.
“The way our brains work, we have evolved to understand each other by tone of voice or seeing facial expressions, but that gets lost through the devices we use to communicate,” Mr. Bejar said last week in an interview at Facebook’s New York offices.
[For more of this story, written by Nick Bilton, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10...g-Cyberbullying.html]
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