Incident 327: Facebook’s On-This-Day Feature Mistakenly Showed Painful Memories to Users

Description: Facebook’s “On This Day” algorithm which highlighted past posts on a user’s private page or News Feed confronted unwanted and painful personal memories to its users.

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Alleged: Facebook developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Facebook users having posts about painful events and Facebook users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
327
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2015-03-24
Editors
Khoa Lam

Incident Reports

Facebook's new nostalgia feature is already bringing up painful memories
theverge.com · 2015

When Sean Forbes logged onto Facebook last week, he was confronted with the photograph of a Navy friend, standing in front of a tangerine sunset with his wife and son, smiling into the camera. Forbes had made the post three years ago to the…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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