Facebook officially issued another apology earlier this month, on behalf of its artificial intelligence software which asked users watching a video that included any black male if they were interested in viewing more “videos about primates.”
Facebook has since disabled the topic recommendation feature and announced plans to investigate the cause of the error.
However, these actions against what has been labelled as an inexcusable mistake have been long overdue.
The video exposing the offence was only recently exposed on a British tabloid. Created by The Daily Mail, the video featured a compilation of clips of Black men in altercations with white civilians and police officers (with notably zero connections to monkeys or primates).
The video was dated June 27, 2020, implying this has been a problem for over a year.
Research shows that facial recognition technologies are biased against people of colour, and have greater difficulty identifying them. These glitches only fuel discrimination against people of colour and can have serious consequences if not addressed.
Similar to Facebook, other tech giants have faced scrutiny over the years regarding biases within their artificial intelligence systems, particularly concerning race.
Back in 2015, Google Photos mistakenly labelled pictures of black people as “gorillas” to which Google responded that it was “genuinely sorry.” Two years after the scandal, it came to light that Google’s solution to the glitch was to censor the word “gorilla” from searches, in addition to blocking “chimp,” “chimpanzee” and “monkey.”
Facebook, however, has long since struggled with race-related issues.
Back in 2016, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg had to ask employees to stop crossing out the phrase “Black Lives Matter” and replacing it with “All Lives Matter” within a common space in the company’s headquarters.
Hundreds of employees staged a virtual walkout last year to protest against how the organization handled an offensive post from former President Donald J. Trump regarding the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
And after July’s European Soccer Championship, when three Black members of England’s national soccer team were racially abused on the social networking platform for missing penalty kicks in the championship game, the organization struggled to regain control and take a stance against the abuse.
In an attempt to combat these issues, Facebook has hired a vice president of civil rights and further released a civil rights audit.
However, the organization’s annual diversity report continues to expose that the company lacks representation within its talent pool. The organization’s annual most recent diversity report, published in July, disclosed that only 4.4% of its U.S.-based employees were Black, up from only 3.9% the previous year.
The lack of representation within the organization likely feeds an environment that is less sensitive to discrimination against minority groups both internally and externally.
For Facebook to remain successful in the future it will need to adopt a more holistic approach to recognizing and improving the diversity within the organization. This can be an opportunity to negate bias and build a foundation that is more understanding and open to different individuals.
We are living in a world that is less willing to accept social and racial injustices and gives the power to consumers to reject the products and services of organizations. Therefore Facebook can’t ignore dealing with racial problems or deprioritize them and expect to keep users and employees happy. Eventually, “I’m sorry” won’t cut it anymore.
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