Facebook issues an apology after an ‘unacceptable error’ was made by the systems artificial intelligence (AI) which resulted in the labeling of Black men as ‘primates’.
There has been confirmation by the social media platform that the recommendation feature for a video about Black men that asked viewers if they want to ‘keep seeing videos on primates.’
The error was made concerning a video that was recorded back in June 2020, uploaded by MailOnline, of a white man calling the police on a group of black men who were celebrating a birthday party.
A former Facebook employee made the company aware of the error and urged the company to take action to remove the offensive comment.
‘This ‘keep seeing’ prompt is unacceptable. @Facebook… and despite the video being more than a year old, a friend got this prompt yesterday.’
‘Please escalate. This is egregious.’
A spokesperson for Facebook released a statement to The New York Times stating that they were investigating the ‘root cause’ for the error and the AI feature has since been disabled.
While the company did apologize and state the they are investigating the mistake, this is not the first time a major tech company has mislabeled Black people. Back in 2015, there were auto tags of Google Photos of Black people being labeled as ‘gorillas.’
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