Facebook mistakenly labels Black men ‘primates’

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Sept 4, 2021: Facebook has announced that it has disabled its subject recommendation feature after labelling black men “primates” in a video on the social network.

A Facebook spokesman called it a “clearly unacceptable mistake” and said the recommendation software had been taken offline.

“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’s facial recognition software has been blown up by civil rights activists who accurately identify problems, especially for those who are not white.

According to the New York Times, Facebook users who recently watched a British tabloid video showing black men were shown an auto-generated prompt asking if they wanted to “watch videos about primates.”

This prompt appears after a Facebook video published in June 2022,  posted by the Daily Mail, which is titled, “White Man Calls Police for Black Men in Marina.”

Although humans belong to many species in the primate family, the video had nothing to do with monkeys, chimpanzees or gorillas. Former Facebook content design manager Darcy Groves shared a screen capture of the recommendation on Twitter.

“This ‘keep seeing’ prompt is unacceptable,” Groves tweeted, aiming the message at former colleagues at Facebook.

The social media giant Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg, has faced a number of similar controversies in recent years.

In 2020, hundreds of advertisers signed the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, organized by social justice groups, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Free Press, to put pressure on Facebook to stop hate speech and misinformation.

They also urged Facebook to take concrete steps to prevent hate speech particularly after the death of George Floyd, a black man, who dies in police custody.

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