Facebook fail

(Photo by Darren Abate/Invision for Facebook/AP Images)

(Bloomberg View) — If you’re on Facebook, then at some point over the past two weeks you got a little note from the company saying, “It’s been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it.” And then you saw your “Year in Review,” a collection of things that the company’s algorithms decided were your most important moments. The items were likely chosen because they showed up a lot in your stream or they garnered a lot of comments or they were shared. And that single feature, as many users pointed out, led to “inadvertent algorithmic cruelty.” Facebook pushed in our faces photos of loved ones who died and other heartwrenching moments from 2014.

Anyone inclined to use the service as more than a carefully curated, fake, happy-all-the time repository of our most emotionally manicured selves were put on notice. You can express genuinely sad things on Facebook, and they’ll be handled with all the sensitivity that only a bot can provide. It’s been a great year (when your family was torn apart)! Thanks for being a part of it.