Facebook has apologised after learning, yet again, that not everything can be done algorithmically. Some things, it seems, need the human touch. The company’s latest blunder stems from a seemingly innocuous feature it rolls out to its users shortly before Christmas every year, called the Year in Review. It lets users automatically select photos, wall posts and other content from a user’s past year, offering those which gained the most responses in likes or comments as “highlights”. Facebook users can then piece together a scrapbook of the past year, and experience instant nostalgia. This year, to go one step further, Facebook automatically picked one particularly well-engaged photo to present to users, under the banner: “Here’s what your year looked like!” For many users, that will have been a happy memory, such as a graduation, wedding, or the birth of a child. But for some users, the algorithm forced painful memories back to the surface.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 04:46:26 +0000
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