The Trust Engineers

Facebook's Trust Engineering team, led by Arturo Bejar, redesigned photo reporting tools to reduce false flags by adding emotional context options like 'it's embarrassing' and prewritten message templates to encourage direct user communication. Small linguistic changes—such as adding 'it's' before emotion labels or using 'please' in messages—significantly increased user engagement and resolution rates. The system leveraged behavioral psychology to shift users from adversarial reporting to interpersonal resolution.

It reveals how subtle language design in tech interfaces can dramatically shift user behavior and resolve complex social conflicts at scale.

1. 01Adding 'it's' before emotion options (e.g., 'it's embarrassing') increased user selection of emotional context by 28% by depersonalizing the judgment.
2. 02Prewritten message templates like 'Hey, I didn't like this photo. Take it down' boosted message-sending rates from 20% to 50%.
3. 03Including the recipient's name in the message ('Hey Robert') improved effectiveness by 7%, and 'would you please' outperformed 'would you mind' by 4%.