The result of a move that will cozy itself right into the middle of an upcoming Tech Times feature -- "Sinister, Sage or Both: The Curious Case of Facebook's 2014 Changes" -- Facebook's new Year in Review feature celebrated the passing of a father's little girl.
Facebook's Year in Review algorithm assumes everyone had a great year, packaging a series of each individuals posts into celebratory slides. Eric Meyer, a father still mourning the death of his daughter, found other people's Year in Review posts easy enough to bypass, but the emergence of his own may have picked at raw wounds.
He didn't go looking for grief that day, but it found him anyway, stated Meyer. He blames Facebook's programmers and engineers.
"Until today, when I got this in my feed, exhorting me to create one of my own," states Meyer. "'Eric, here's what your year looked like!' A picture of my daughter, who is dead. Who died this year. Yes, my year looked like that. True enough. My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl. It was still unkind to remind me so forcefully."
It's algorithmic cruelty, says Meyer of the feature's emotional assault on him and anyone else who had a rough year. The feature works as planned for those who took selfies in every state and around the globe in 2014, but it can be cruel to individuals who suffered losses in the last year, struggled through divorces or spent a good deal of time in the hospital.
"To show me Rebecca's face and say 'Here's what your year looked like!' is jarring," states Meyer. "It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong. Coming from code, it's just unfortunate. These are hard, hard problems. It isn't easy to programmatically figure out if a picture has a ton of Likes because it's hilarious, astounding, or heartbreaking."
Meyer doesn't call for the feature's removal, but he said it would be better implemented if Facebook simply first asks users if they want to see a preview. People should be given the option to say no for now or to decline forever, states Meyer.
Facebook has apologized to Meyer, according to the Washington Post. "[The app] was awesome for a lot of people, but clearly in this case we brought him grief rather than joy," said Jonathan Gheller, the product manager for Facebook's Year in Review app. "We can do better -- I'm very grateful he took the time in his grief to write the blog post."
A variant of Facebook's Year in Review algorithm has been applied on the macro level, where the social network looks back on the year the world shared. The top events of 2014 where, from top to bottom, the World Cup; Ebola virus outbreak; Elections in Brazil; Robin Williams; Ice Bucket Challenge; Conflict in Gaza; Malaysia Airlines; Super Bowl; Michael Brown/Ferguson; and the Sochi Winter Olympics.
