Social media giant Facebook has apologised after its artificial intelligence wrongly labelled a video featuring Black men’s altercations with White police officers as ‘about primates.’ Facebook said in a statement that the error was ‘unacceptable.’
A Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying, “While we have made improvements to our AI we know it’s not perfect and we have more progress to make. We apologize to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations.
“We apologize to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations.”
Facebook said that it had launched an investigation and disabled the entire topic recommendation feature in the meantime.
Users were asked if they would like to ‘keep seeing videos about primates’ after they had watched clips of Black men in altercations with White civilians and police officers.
The matter came to light after Darci Groves, a former content design manager at Facebook, told The New York Times that she had received a screenshot of the prompt from a friend. She said that she immediately shared the offensive screenshot on a product feedback forum for current and former employees of the company. This, according to Sky News, prompted the social media company to look into the case.
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, had to face condemnation after three English footballers namely Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho faced incessant online abuse for missing penalties during the Euro final against Italy.