Facebook Issues Apology After ‘Year In Review’ Feature Turns Tragic For Some Users

Facebook recently provides new application for its users known as "Year in Review". Facebook now admits that forcing people to revisit their most Liked and commented upon photos and statuses from the past year might not have been the best idea. As Facebook uses the tagline "It’s been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it." But though some people would not have a great year and would prefer not to be reminded of it. This week, the product manager for the social media company's "Year in Review" app apologized to Eric Meyer, whose six-year-old daughter died of brain cancer earlier this year. Eric didn’t want to relive his painful memories, but was forced to when Facebook automatically positioned the “Year In Review” banner at the top of his news feed. The algorithm for choosing which images appear in the banner depends on how many “likes” they’ve received.

From Meyer's posts:

And I know, of course, that this is not a deliberate assault. This inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases, reminding people of the awesomeness of their years, showing them selfies at a party or whale spouts from sailing boats or the marina outside their vacation house.

But for those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in the hospital, or were hit by divorce or losing a job or any one of a hundred crises, we might not want another look at this past year.

To show me Rebecca's face and say "Here's what your year looked like!" is jarring. It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong. Coming from code, it's just unfortunate. These are hard, hard problems. It isn't easy to programmatically figure out if a picture has a ton of Likes because it's hilarious, astounding, or heartbreaking.

Jonathan Gheller, Facebook’s project manager for “Year in Review,” apologized to Meyer and released a statement to the Post addressing the issue:

“[The app] was awesome for a lot of people, but clearly in this case we brought him grief rather than joy,” he said. “We can do better — I’m very grateful he took the time in his grief to write the blog post.”

Others have also complained about the feature.

 Did you use the Year In Review feature? What did you think? Let us know in the comments.