Facebook Apologizes for Automated ‘Primates’ Label on Video of Black Men

The incident, generated by artificial intelligence software, “was clearly an unacceptable error,” the social network giant says

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Facebook apologized Friday after a video featuring Black men in confrontations with white police officers and other civilians was found to be labeled by artificial intelligence software as a video “about primates.”

“This was clearly an unacceptable error and 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,” Facebook said in a statement to USA Today.

The Daily Mail video published to Facebook, first reported by The New York Times, was accompanied by a prompt asking whether users would like to “keep seeing videos about Primates.”

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