A Design Code for Big Tech

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service. Today’s guest is Ravi Iyer, a data scientist and moral psychologist at the Psychology of Technology Institute, which is a project of the University of Southern California Marshall School’s Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making and the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He is also a former Facebook executive; at the company he worked on a variety of civic integrity issues. The Neely Center has developed a design code that seeks to address a number of concerns about the harms of social media, including issues related to child online safety. It is endorsed by individuals and organizations ranging from academics at NYU and USC to the Tech Justice Law Project and New Public, as well as technologists that have worked at platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google.  I spoke to Iyer about the details of the proposed code, and in particular how they relate to the debate over child online safety. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion. Justin Hendrix: Ravi, what does the Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making get up to? Ravi Iyer: So we focus on ethics and technology. That’s part because we think technology is an important force in the world that has powerful shaping effects on our behavior and has powerful effects on both our individual well being and our societal well being. So we think that’s it’s not the only way we could have…A Design Code for Big Tech