Outrageous! Facebook mistakenly labels black men as 'Primates', apologises for 'unacceptable error'

The social media giant has now disabled its topic recommendation feature, and have apologised to "anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations."

Pic courtesy: Reuters

Facebook is once again in trouble! For users who had in recent times watched a video from a British tabloid featuring Black men on the social networking platform, it came as rude shock when Facebook's automated prompt aksed them if they wanted to keep seeing "videos of Primates", reported the New York Times.

The social media giant has now disabled its topic recommendation feature. A Facebook spokesperson called it a "clearly unacceptable error" and said the recommendation software involve was taken offline.

In response to news agency AFP's inquiry, Facebook said, "We apologise to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations."

"We disabled the entire topic recommendation feature as soon as we realised this was happening so we could investigate the cause and prevent this from happening again."

Civil rights advocates have been extremely critical of facial recognition software and they have pointed out several problems with accuracy, particularly it comes to people who are not white.

The video that has caused the furore is dated June 27, 2020 and it was orginally posted by The Daily Mail, featuring clips of black men involved in fights white civilians and police officers. The video had no connection to monkeys or primates.

Dani Lever, a Facebook spokeswoman, said in a statement to New York Times, “As we have said, while we have made improvements to our A.I., we know it’s not perfect, and we have more progress to make. We apologize to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations.”

A former Facebook content design manager Darci Groves had brought the matter to light when she tweeted a screenshot of the video and the prompt and wrote, "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."