Millions of Facebook users were shocked and bewildered on Friday after a Facebook bug declared people - or the users themselves - dead! The Facebook message even asked if they wanted to memorialize the said person's account. The bug reportedly affected the account of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook has been in constant development since it first became available for use. The largest social media in the world has 1.7 billion registered active monthly users worldwide.
On Friday, Business Insider reported that Facebook accounts, including that of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, had a header asking the user if they wanted the account memorialized. The additional text read "We hope people who love will find comfort in the things others share to remember and celebrate her life."
I'm guessing Zuckerberg isn't dead either... pic.twitter.com/9M9uaVsvjR
— Peter Stringer (@peterstringer) November 11, 2016
This was a surprise to a lot of folks, but thankfully, Facebook took down the notifications before more backlash occurred. The memorialization notice would allow users to create a memorial to the deceased account holder. Since Facebook became widely available, the accounts of deceased persons are still accessible online. These are usually dormant accounts, unless Facebook is notified that the person has died. Memorialized accounts prevent anyone from logging in to the account. It is against Facebook policy to give access to the deceased's survivors.
Yahoo! News reported that the bug was fixed quickly. "For a brief period today, a message meant for memorialized profiles was mistakenly posted to other accounts," a Facebook spokesperson said. "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 article read.
This is not an isolated controversy. There have been instances before where Facebook had to explain itself or otherwise defend itself against errors or any alleged intentional action. In the aftermath of the recently concluded election, Facebook has been accused of influencing the election with its choice of posts on user timelines.
A few years ago, Facebook admitted that they experimented with user reactions by showing a bias towards either feel good events or those which are depressing. Even before that, some users accused Facebook that images that have been deleted are still accessible via the image's URL. Facebook has since fixed that problem and deleted image URLs are no longer accessible.
