Global social media juggernaut Facebook has had a rough past week. Days after the surprise victory of Donald Trump in the November 8, 2016 US Presidential Elections, sore anti-Trump critics have slammed FB for what has been perceived as the social network’s role in acing the win for Trump, especially in having played host to a plethora of reported false news item in its own feed as well as recommended outside news, made worse by Facebook’s response to the criticism in the past by axing its human news editors and relying only on their system’s algorithms. This blame game is bad enough, but towards the first post-poll weekend a new glitch surfaced on Facebook that either made their image worse, or gave people something to laugh about.
According to Variety, last Friday November 11 there was a bug in Facebook’s programming that messed with the status of multiple users, regarding the conversion of an FB account to memorialized status when its user is reported to the network as having passed away. The commemorative status was a nifty means of ensuring that a Facebook user’s page is maintained in a way to preserve his online presence even long after his death. A passed user’s Friends may still visit the page and see a generated memorial message to the user even as they post on the wall if they wanted to do so. The system error instead tripped the memorial status of countless FB regulars, declaring them to be dead to the users themselves and their circles of friends. Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was not spared; his account too was feted with a message of condolence and memorial that read, to wit: “We hope people who love Mark will find comfort in the things others share to remember and celebrate his life.”
Facebook was quick to publicize the actions of FB memorial bug in a statement the afternoon of November 11. “For a brief period today, a message meant for memorialized profiles was mistakenly posted to other accounts,” their spokesperson stated. “This was a terrible error that we have now fixed. We are very sorry that this happened and we worked as quickly as possible to fix it.”
The account status change was not universal across the social network; some users were lucky and others not. The users who found themselves declared dead on FB quickly took to Twitter to reassure their contacts that they were in fact, still alive. The micro-blog service must have been grateful for that one-day boon in user activity, as they had been floundering in recent times due to their shrinking user- base.
Photo Credit to http://www.realclearlife.com/
0 comments:
Post a Comment