Facebook labels black men 'primates'
Occurred: September 2021
Report incident ๐ฅ | Improve page ๐ | Access database ๐ข
Facebook's AI-powered recommendation system asked users watching a Daily Mail video featuring Black men whether they like to '[k]eep seeing videos about 'Primates', prompting significant controversy.
The video was published by the Daily Mail on its Facebook page and depicted white people, including police officers, confronting Black men. No primates were shown.ย
The discovery led to accusations of racism, condemnation of Facebook's apparent inability to manage inappropriate content on its platform, including its over-reliance on technology to detect and manage unsafe content.ย
The company apologised for its 'unacceptable error', said it had disabled its topic recommendation feature responsible for the message, and would look to ensure it does not happen again.
Recommender system
A recommender system, or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing system with terms such as platform, engine, or algorithm), is a subclass of information filtering system that provides suggestions for items that are most pertinent to a particular user.ย
Source: Wikipedia ๐
System ๐ค
Facebook content recommendation system
Operator: Meta/Facebook
Developer: Meta/Facebook
Country: USA
Sector: Technology
Purpose: Recommend topics
Technology: Topic recommendation system
Issue: Bias/discrimination; Safety
News, commentary, analysis ๐๏ธ
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/technology/facebook-ai-race-primates.html
https://engadget.com/facebook-ai-mislabels-video-black-men-primates-044255703.html
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/04/facebook-sorry-labelling-black-men-primates-video/
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/09/03/facebook-video-black-men-primates-apology/5721948001/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebook-ai-slaps-primates-label-on-daily-mail-video-of-black-men
https://www.thewrap.com/facebook-apology-primates-label-video-black-men/
https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/4/22657026/facebook-mislabeling-video-black-men-primates-algorithm
Page info
Type: Incident
Published: September 2021
Last updated: June 2024