Facebook apologizes for calling black men ‘monkeys’

Facebook issued an apology on Friday after its artificial intelligence system described black men as “monkeys” in a video posted on its platform.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed that what happened was a “clearly unacceptable error,” according to a statement received by the American newspaper “The New York Times”.
He added that the “Facebook” program for marking videos has been disabled.

“We disabled the topic recommendation feature entirely, as soon as we realized this was happening, so that we could investigate the cause and prevent a recurrence,” he said.

“We apologize to anyone who may have seen these offensive descriptions,” Facebook said in a statement.

The British newspaper, “Daily Mail”, was the first to reveal the offensive video, which was posted on Facebook on June 27, 2020, and bears the title “A white man calls policemen about black men in the marina,” which shows black men participating in Disagreements with police officers and white civilians.

And the “Daily Mail” pointed out that once the video ends, Facebook asks its users if they want to “continue watching videos about primates”, which include “monkeys”.

For his part, the product manager of the “Facebook Watch” video division confirmed that the company “is looking into the root cause of the unacceptable error.”

It is noteworthy that technology companies, including “Google” and “Twitter”, have been criticized in the past for potential biases within their artificial intelligence programs.

In 2015, “Google” marked two black faces with the word “gorilla”, to which the company later apologized, and said in a statement to the American newspaper “The Wall Street Journal” that it was “really sorry that this happened.”