Under pressure to stop the flood of fake and hateful posts into our daily newsfeeds, beleaguered Facebook had to apologize again Wednesday — this time after a feature that sends up animated balloons and confetti applied them to posts about the tragic earthquake in Indonesia that killed more than 130 people and displaced thousands.
The festive animations were automatically sent on posts in which Indonesians used the world “selmet” to convey that they hadn’t been hurt in the the 6.9 magnitude earthquake that struck the island of Lombok Sunday. The Indonesian word has several meanings, including “unhurt” and “safe,” but also “congratulations.”
The algorithm flub was noticed and called out on Twitter by Herman Saksono, a computer science PhD student on Northeast University whose profile says he tweets in both English and Indonesian.
He told the Motherboard news site that he was surprised the Facebook algorithms didn’t account for the double meanings of selemet.
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“People use the word interchangeably, it’s the same word but for different meanings,” Saksono told Motherboard. “Researchers spend a lot of time before launching a function like this to make sure it truly fits the culture and practices in languages in which it will be used. I would expect Facebook to do the same, given all the resources they have. I guess they missed this one.”
In a statement to Motherboard, Lisa Stratton, a Facebook spokesperson, said the celebratory animations are available globally, “however, we regret that it appeared in in this unfortunate context and have since turned off the feature locally.”
“Our hearts go out to the people affected by this earthquake,” Stratton said.
Here are five other times Facebook has asked for users’ forgiveness:
1. Most infamous among the things Facebook has had to apologize for, of course, is allowing users to be bombarded with manipulative posts by Russian troll farms during the 2016 election cycle.
“For the ways my work has been used to divide rather than to bring us together, I ask for forgiveness and I will work to do better,” founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in September 2017 amid fiery criticism about the social media site’s role in the Russian meddling of the election.
2. Zuckerberg said he was sorry again in April 2018 that Cambridge Analytica collected data on up to 87 million Facebook members, and that the public profiles had been scraped of nearly all users.
Promising a full investigation of every app that had collected people’s data, Zuckerberg said at the time: “We’re an idealistic and optimistic company. … But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough. We didn’t focus enough on preventing abuse and thinking how people could use these tools to do harm as well. …”
In prepared remarks for his congressional testimony, he said: “It was a mistake and I’m sorry. … There’s more we can do here to limit the information developers can access and put more safeguards in place to prevent abuse.”
3. In May 2010, after reporters found a privacy loophole that allowed advertisers to access user identification, Zuckerberg admitted that “sometimes we move too fast.”
He also promised Facebook would make its privacy controls more user-friendly. “We will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services,” he said at the time.
4. In November 2011, after Facebook reached a consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission for deceiving consumers about privacy, Zuckerberg said the was “the first to admit we’ve made a bunch of mistakes.”
“Facebook has always been committed to being transparent about the information you have stored with us — and we have led the internet in building tools to give people the ability to see and control what they share,” he said at the time.
5. In April 2017, Zuckerberg apologized after a man used Facebook Live to livestream a video of him killing Robert Godwin Sr., 74.
“Our hearts go out to the family and friends of Robert Godwin St., and we have a lot of work — and we will keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening,” Zuckerberg said.
Image: Indonesian soldiers looking for victims trapped at a collapsed mosque following an earthquake in Tanjung on August 8, 2018 in Lombok Island, Indonesia. More than 100 people have been confirmed dead after a 6.9-magnitude earthquake hit the Indonesian island, Lombok, and neighbouring Bali which left at least 20,000 people homeless. Based on reports, officials believe that the death toll may rise with aftershocks expected to rattle the area and aid agencies say their priority is to now provide shelter for displaced people. (Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images)
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