The Guardian reports today that "Facebook has been forced to apologise after it spent hours suggesting bizarre, vulgar and upsetting searches to users on Thursday night. The social network’s search suggestions, which are supposed to automatically offer the most popular search terms to users, apparently broke around 4am in the UK, and started to suggest unpleasant results for those who typed in “video of”. Multiple users posted examples on Twitter, with the site proposing searches ... "
here I'm taking out the language used in the story, as it may be triggering for many people - the proposed suggested searches had to do with young girls performing sex acts.
I deactivated my FB account over a year ago when I fully realized the damaging impact social media sites are having on our culture and discourse - and after I - who lost scores of family members in the Holocaust - had someone post a picture of Hitler in my timeline. I raise this here because I believe many well-intentioned people use these sites and believe they are using them for good, but are unaware that they are participating in a phenomenon that has a very, very dark reality, including the presence of explicit content about sexual abuse as well as other kinds of exploitation, violence and hate.
I appreciate the ACEs Connection site because it provides us a way to connect and communicate without using one of the large social media platforms. I would also mention that Youtube apparently has a tremendous amount of pornography involving children, and that the Youtube algorhythm shows viewers more an more extreme content based on what they have just watched.
Here are two podcast episodes that look at the realities of social media closely and carefully:
Social Science Bites: https://www.
%20http://www.bestoftheleft.co..._valley_and_big_data
Link to the full Guardian story here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/facebook-apologises-child-sexual-abuse-offensive-autocomplete-terms
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