Science & Tech
Greg Evans
Mar 19, 2018
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Facebook has been forced to remove a series of offensive, suggestive and sexual predictive search terms from their website.
On Friday people on Twitter began informing others or shared screenshots of their Facebook search bar which presented them with either sexually explicit or violent autocomplete after they typed in the words "video of..."
Warning, the following posts may be offensive to some.
Mashablereport that nothing happened if you chose to click on the search terms and no videos appeared resembling those suggestions.
Nonetheless, it is still a bizarre occurrence and not something that you would accidentally want to stumble across on social media.
However, after being alerted to the presence of these autocompletes Facebook have removed them but did clarify that the search terms on their site were representative of what people had been searching for in the past.
In a statement to Mashable a Facebook spokesperson wrote:
We’re very sorry this happened. As soon as we became aware of these offensive predictions we removed them.
Facebook search predictions are representative of what people may be searching for on Facebook and are not necessarily reflective of actual content on the platform.
We do not allow sexually explicit imagery, and we are committed to keeping such content off of our site.
We are looking into why these search predictions appeared and going forward, we’re working to improve the quality of search predictions.
While this is an encouraging move from Facebook it, unfortunately, isn't the case on the rest of the Internet where unwanted search terms can still occasionally pop up on Google and Twitter.
In the case of Google, they have actively removed anti-semitic, sexual, violent or harmful suggestions from their search engine, which is usually compiled through an algorithm.
HT Mashable
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