Facebook classified Africans as "primates"
Published 5 September 2021 at 09.36
MEDIA. Facebook has turned off its automated recommendation function. This after users who have seen a clip about Africans have been advised to watch other "videos about primates".


The recommendation was shown during a video from the British newspaper Daily Mail with the headline: "White man sends the police on black men at a marina".

A spokesperson for Facebook states that this is a "manifestly unacceptable error", writes Al-Jazeera.

The automatic recommendation feature has been disabled for the time being.

"We apologize to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations," Facebook said in a statement.

This is the latest in a long line of scandals in which automatic AI functions on various websites have proven to be "racist". Often it is precisely about image recognition systems that identify Africans as monkeys.