Facebook apologizes after 'Year in Review' stirs up Bad Memories for some Users
'Algorithmic cruelty': Facebook's Year in Review feature criticised for being Insensitive.
Facebook has once again been panned for toying insensitively with users' emotions after its "Year In Review" feature forced a prominent web designer to relive the pain of losing his young daughter.
In recent days the social network has been prompting users to create and share a personalised scrapbook of photographic moments they posted during the year.
Facebook prepopulates the photographs from a user's timeline, although they can be customised later. Users are prodded repeatedly with advertisements for the feature, even after they choose not to create an album in the first instance.
But what for many may simply be an annoyance, for those who have had a bad year it can prove heartbreaking.
In what he has dubbed Facebook's "inadvertant algorithmic cruelty", Eric Meyer, who is credited with advocating for web development standards such as cascading style sheets (CSS), was repeatedly shown images of his deceased daughter, Rebecca.
"I didn't go looking for grief this afternoon, but it found me anyway, and I have designers and programmers to thank for it," he wrote on his Personal Blog.
Many of the Year in Review previews were captioned: "It's been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it."
Mr. Meyer criticised Facebook for failing to give users an easy opt-out, instead repeatedly promoting the feature "through different fun-and-fabulous backrounds, as if celebrating a death, and there is no obvious way to stop it".
Mr. Meyer's sentiments were widely shared across social media and attracted many similar complaints from those who had lost family members or experienced other traumatic events.
The posts are slickly designed, even if their visual uniformity can make scrolling through a newsfeed of the digital holiday letters a bit grating. However, in some cases the summaries can go beyond irritating and become downright cruel.
The default tagline for the posts is “It’s been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it.” But not everyone actually had a great year. For some users, the prompts to view their own digital year in review may dig up painful memories.
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Eric Meyer, a web design consultant and writer, is one of those people. Earlier this year, he lost his daughter to brain cancer on her sixth birthday. For that reason, Meyer wrote in a blog post, he had actively avoided looking at previews of his own automatically generated summary post.
But Facebook put a personalized prompt advertising the feature in his newsfeed, he wrote, prominently featuring the face of his dead daughter -- surrounded by what appears to be clip art figures having a party.
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