Facebook has found itself in another mess, this time its autocomplete feature goofing things up. As has been found, typing the two words ‘video of’ showed some disturbing results that pertain to explicit sex or violence.
Among the suggestions that cropped up include ‘video of girl s**king d**k underwater’. That no doubt would cater to a distorted thought process seeking new things to do when underwater though no one is sure what made Facebook to suggest such weird stuff early in the morning.
If that is not all, the other suggestions are no less disgusting. For options provided include ‘videos of Florida school shooting’, videos of Florida shooting’ and ‘videos of school shooting’. Those again aren’t things that anyone with a sane mind will like to go through, what with all the blood and macabre sight of young kids falling to bullets of another retarded mind.
Fortunately, Facebook didn’t actually show any of the videos that its search results suggested. Nonetheless, it still can be considered unacceptable for the biggest social networking site to even suggest search results that border insanity. The company didn’t offer any explanations either though the best thing is, it did the needful quickly enough. For the disturbing search results got rectified within just hours itself.
Questions naturally are also being raised about the autocomplete search algorithm Facebook uses and whether it was just a one-off incident. What is known though is that the company takes into account both profiles and pages along with content like post to draw search suggestions.
Google, on the other hand, takes into account the search terms a user has used in the past, search terms others are using in the region along with the specific terms the user is using at the present moment. Also, it’s not that Google has been immune to such anomalies as unwanted stuff also has shown up in its search suggestions as well.
However, the good thing with Google is that it has a feature that lets users to report things that anyone finds offensive. It also follows a strict policy of preventing sexual, violent or hate terms from being auto-suggested.
As for Facebook, the last time it was in the news was when it fielded sexually offensive questions during a survey.
