Do tech companies have a responsibility to create good?

It has been over two years since Google, in becoming Alphabet, dropped “Don’t be Evil” for “Do the Right Thing”. However, the events of this past year have shed light on just how far away many technology companies are from doing this “right thing”.

Against this backdrop, I have been thinking about what Harvard Professor of Cognition and Education, Howard Gardner, calls “good work”.

“Doing things in a new way is easy; we call this novelty. What’s challenging is to do things in a new way that eventually gets accepted by others; we call this creativity. What’s even more challenging is to do something in a new way that is ethical and advances the human condition; we call this ‘good work.’” — Howard Gardner

How might we think about doing “good work” as it relates to tech and product development? Those like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg have been public about the need to take this on.

In early March, Dorsey tweeted:

We’re committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.

I believe that everyone in tech — big and small companies, from CEOs to designers and engineers — have a responsibility to do work in a way that is ethical and advances the human condition. As Gardner makes clear, doing this kind of ‘good work’ is even more challenging than creating things that are new or creative. It will take thousands of new ideas, collaboration, empathy and maybe even a more concerted effort to get out of our tech communities and into those that we serve.

Without over simplifying it, I’d like to offer one framework for thinking about the challenge, and a few solutions.

Gresham’s Law & Human Nature

Here is a classic thought experiment: Imagine that you have two types of coins. Both can be spent in the public market and both have the same purchase value. However, one type of coin is made out of a precious metal, and the other is made out of a base metal. Which do you use in the market and which do you save at home?

The history of silver coins in the U.S and Canada, shows that most people will elect to spend the base metal and save the precious metal. And, as a result most of the money in circulation has an actual value that is less than its traded value.

This concept, called Gresham’s law, is most commonly applied to money markets, but imagine for a moment that rather than silver and gold, we are talking about social currency.

In the social information markets like Twitter and Facebook, what type of currency is the public more likely to spend? “Good” currency, where the value is equal to what it is worth, or “bad” currency, where the value exceeds what it is actually worth?

A look at the current tenor of conversations on our social platforms, shows that we (as a total population) prefer to share the things that are simplistic, ignorant, or even vulgar and hateful, while keeping the things that are beautiful, or deeply truthful, to ourselves.

And this phenomenon may well be explained by Gresham’s law. Why share things that have actual real, personal value, when sharing the things that are less important, or downright spiteful, are treated with equal, or even, more attention?

Implications for Social & Information Platforms

We are in the early phases of social and information platforms. They are unregulated, unruly places where we are free to express whatever parts of our thoughts and lives we decide. In fact, this is by design. Early founders, being most often visionary types who are optimistic about tech’s potential, underestimated the simple lesson that Gresham’s Law illuminates about human nature.

Beyond theory, evidence is mounting that we prefer false information. A recent study by MIT analyzing 126,000 posts on Twitter and found that those containing false information were 70% more likely to be retweeted. False stories spread faster, and to more people.

Tweets containing truthful information took six times as long to reach the same volume of people as tweets with false information.

Now that our eyes are open to the risks of unbiased platforms, we should be more proactive and intentional about what we create in the first place. If we want to elevate our conversations and interactions, then we need to bake that intention into the features we develop.

This does not mean that technology companies should become autocratic organizations that dictate what can and cannot be shared. But it does mean that we should have an opinion on what is good and bad, and should then make every effort to promote the better self.

Let’s talk about how we might do that…

A Good Offensive Strategy

The approach by most social platforms to control against extreme depravity is to try to remove the instigators or the problematic behavior. For example, Integrity teams at companies like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are tasked with detecting spam, porn, and revoking or removing accounts that are abusing policies.

However, defending against aggressors is not the same as having a good offensive strategy.

There are three ways that I think anyone with power to influence product development or company culture should consider:

1. We should have an opinion on what type of engagement we expect and it should be more nuanced than simply “more”. We should look into leading indicators of positive behavior and map the interactions that correlate with healthy engagement.
2. Roadmaps should include features that not only generate revenue or improve retention, but that also create more healthy, vibrant and sociable communities. We should have a proactive strategy from hiring through to QA that supports building for positive impact.
3. Company culture should aim to be a microcosm of the larger community that we want to create. We all need to speak well of others, be positive, and bring our own humanity to work.

In short, we need to do the hard work to determine how to measure good behavior, build towards that, and invest in the systems and people to do that work. If not, we will in all likelihood find ourselves in a world of fraudulence and diluted social interactions, inured to negativity.

It’s time that we go beyond blocking evil, and actively and intentionally create good.

Learned something? Hold down the 👏 to say “thanks!” and help others find this article.

Thank you to those who shared your perspective with me on this topic. Your insights help shape my approach. I’m happy to continue to engage on this topic here. Please leave a comment below!