Just before Valentine’s Day last week, Belgian security researcher Inti De Ceukelaire noticed something strange on Facebook. He found the social network’s search function treated pictures of men and women in dramatically different ways. Searching for “photos of my female friends” returned a hodgepodge of images, whereas a similar search for “photos of my male friends” yielded no results. Worse, Facebook assumed “male” was simply a typo for the word “female.”
Tech blogs picked up on De Ceukelaire’s tweets, and after replicating the results, published stories with headlines like “Facebook lets you search for pictures of your female friends, but not your male ones.” Even more damning were the autocomplete predictions Facebook offered: When many users typed “photos of my female friends,” the platform suggested phrases like “in bikinis” or “at the beach.”
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Source: Why Facebook Search Suggests ‘Photos of Female Friends in Bikinis’ | WIRED