September 7, 2021
Technology giant Facebook has apologized after a June 27 video wrongly labelled black men as “primates,”
Facebook said in a release: “We apologize to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations.”
The video was published on Facebook by the Daily Mail newspaper under the name “white man calls cops on black men at marina” which shows black men arguing with police and civilians.
According to the New York Times, Facebook users who watched the video received an automatic request to ask if they “would like to keep seeing videos about Primates.”
A Facebook spokesman called it a “clearly unacceptable error,” and said the recommendation program in question had already been disabled.
He went on to clarify: “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.”
For more information, read the original story on BBC.
