This archive report was first published on 4 September 2021.
Facebook has faced criticism for its facial recognition software, which has been accused of inaccuracy, particularly when it comes to people of color.
On Friday, the social network acknowledged a 'clearly unacceptable error' when it disabled its topic recommendation feature after it mistakenly labeled Black men as 'primates' in a video.
The error occurred when Facebook users who watched a British tabloid video featuring Black men were shown an auto-generated prompt asking if they would like to 'keep seeing videos about Primates.'
The video in question, posted by the Daily Mail in June 2020, was titled 'White man calls cops on black men at marina.'
Facebook apologized for the mistake, saying it had disabled the entire topic recommendation feature as soon as it realized the error.
"We apologise to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations," Facebook said in response to an AFP inquiry.
"We disabled the entire topic recommendation feature as soon as we realised this was happening so we could investigate the cause and prevent this from happening again," the company added.
