Facebook is under fire today after its AI labeled a video that featured black men as “primates”. In videos featuring black men, Facebook’s AI asked viewers if they wanted to watch more related videos about…primates.
Facebook has since disabled the topic, but not before being condemned by the internet.
“We apologize to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations,” Facebook said in a statement when asked about the video tag. “We disabled the entire topic recommendation feature as soon as we realized this was happening so we could investigate the cause and prevent this from happening again.”
While human beings are scientifically primates, the term primate in culture refers to the lesser of the species, including monkeys, gorillas and chimpanzees. Often times racial slurs for black people including being called the same.