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Facebook once again found itself in the center of a scandal. Its topic recommendation feature mistook black men for “primates” in a video shared on the social network. Video showing a skirmish between black and white men was followed by an auto-generated prompt asking “Keep seeing videos about Primates?”
The video in question was posted by the Daily Mail back in June 2020. It is titled “White man calls cops on black men at marina.”
In one year, the prompt remained and finally drew the public attention. Former Facebook content design manager Darci Groves shared the screenshot on Twitter, calling on her ”friends in Facebook to escalate.”
“Um. This “keep seeing” prompt is unacceptable, Facebook. And despite the video being more than a year old, a friend got this prompt yesterday. Friends at FB, please escalate. This is egregious” – Darci Groves wrote on Twitter.
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Facebook was forced to appologize and to disable the recommendation software.
A company’s spokesperson commented on the issue, calling it a “clearly unacceptable error”.
“We apologize to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations. We disabled the entire topic recommendation feature as soon as we realized this was happening so we could investigate the cause and prevent this from happening again.” Facebook said.
Facebook’s facial recognition software has been blasted by civil rights advocates for several times, as well as the censorship campaigns that are regularly carried out by Zuckerberg’s media giant.
The most recently, Facebook has apologized for having “incorrectly” deleted the publication of Shana Chappell, mother of Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui, 20, who died in the August 26 terrorist attack in Kabul airport.
