People are strange.
I know someone who lost a rather unloved relative recently. Didn’t stop them from sharing the news and collecting hundreds of heartfelt condolences from people who never met the deceased or only saw them on their best behaviour.
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This is not new. When Facebook first started doing this “memories” bullshit a few years ago, I immediately dug into my settings and set the date range so that it would be impossible for Facebook ever to prompt me with stuff like this. Potentially traumatizing or not, I just found it creepy.
I got something of a ‘pump job’ on my anniversary video. https://www.facebook.com/jeirvine/posts/10156263364631327
Quite a bit of projected outrage over an obviously simple gaffe. Natural language clues to the implication of metaphoric phrases like “dancing on my mothers grave” may not have made it into the Facebook AI yet.
Everyone is assuming that it can already distinguish the nuance between “a day I want to share”, “a day I want to remember”, and “a day I want to celebrate”?
If it can’t (and it obviously can’t), then it shouldn’t be trying. I have a private journal application (DayOne) that occasionally tells me in neutral, text-only terms that I have X number of entries for the current date and offers to show them to me (largely because I just haven’t been assed to find the toggle to turn the notification off). It happened to do this for the anniversary of the day I wrote about rolling my truck over in the snow, which was not exactly something I wanted to be reminded of, but it was important for me to write about at the time. Facebook is taking this sort of neutral “this day in history” calendar reminder and attempting to map human emotions onto it without seemingly having any concept of why or how people might use use their site or interact with posts made to it. Creepy factor of Facebook reminding you that it knows about everything you’ve ever told it aside, it’s striking just how unempathetic this sort of “encourage users to engage through happy reminiscences” feature becomes when you get a glimpse at its failure states.
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Yeah, it’s nice to know that Facebook’s algorithm-driven lack of empathy still can’t hold a candle to human-powered lack of empathy. The computer dances on your mother’s grave, but the human internet commenter is right there to remind you it’s your fault for having a computer in the first place.
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That’s what they said about PizzaGate until that one guy volunteered to find out the truth!
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I agree! And the best way to avoid doing that is to #deletefacebook.
Obligitory:
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This. This was a deliberate decision which resulted in an unfortunate outcome, not a “simple gaffe” sensu @dman; a person or persons was behind that decision to go live with a problematic algorithm. And they clearly shouldn’t have. And really, what more clearly explicit an example could anyone require for prompting a review for their process for unleashing digital shoggoths on their users?
No malice may have been intended, but that was absolutely not the result. It looks malicious, and it is malicious, because nobody in Facebook could deign to do an appropriate amount of due diligence in order to see whether or not the AI would cause harm. This “feature” is the product of negligence in the name of engagement.
Also, whether someone should have “shared” a photo of their mother’s grave is pretty much beside the point. Even if it was shared publicly, this example of Artificial Stupidity is not worth defending by deflecting it back on someone sharing something from their own life.
FB’s designers don’t get to choose how others use their service. But they do get to choose which algorithms to deploy against their users. And when they screw up, they don’t get to choose how bad that looks, which, based on an emerging pattern of digital tone-deafness, makes them look anywhere between incompetent or awkward (at best), negligent, and/or malicious at worst.
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Worst part, IMHO, is that, as far as I’m aware, there is no way to officially turn it off.
To effectively shut it off, they can do what you did, yes, but there should be a slider button.
Memories: OFF–ON.
There’s a link to make it less prevalent when they pop up, but that’s not enough.
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FB often wants me to connect to its founder. The link “show less often” is broken, because I keep seeing the damned thing.
Next time I should see if I can’t just block his ass.
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I’m pretty sure that’s just there to make people think it does something, like a disconnected crosswalk button.
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Fisher-Price school of design: goes nowhere, does nothing.
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