Here’s an old apology story with an update.
Remember when Facebook threw that “Hey, [your name], here’s what your year looked like!” party that showed up in your timeline shortly before New Year’s Eve? Most had the caption: “It’s been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it.” There was a picture from your feed, with happy celebrating dance-y people and firework thingies all around it. A web developer named Eric Meyer got one, featuring the beautiful face of his 6-year-old daughter, who’d died of brain cancer during the year. On her birthday.
Meyer called the Year in Review app “inadvertent algorithmic cruelty.” He wasn’t the only one on the receiving end, of course. Several of my friends were exhorted to create their own perky slideshows with an ad featuring a picture of a pet who’d died. Others had years of sickness, loss, divorce. Not the kinds of reminders you want to see pop up, unsolicited, unexpected, big, in your feed (as if from a pal) surrounded by confetti and glitter. Meyer wrote:
Algorithms are essentially thoughtless. They model certain decision flows, but once you run them, no more thought occurs. To call a person “thoughtless” is usually considered a slight, or an outright insult; and yet, we unleash so many literally thoughtless processes on our users, on our lives, on ourselves.
I imagine Facebook as a bro-land populated by wee perky Zuckerbergian singletons in the prime of their lives, playing Nerf basketball in the office and occasionally being chided by an indulgent, smiling, head-shaking Sheryl Sandberg. The average FB user is older than these guys. We’ve lost more. Or so I thought.
Meyer’s story went viral. Facebook responded quickly. Jonathan Gheller, product manager for the “Year in Review” app, told the Washington Post he’d reached out to Meyer and is “personally very sorry” for the pain the preview feature caused Meyer. “It was awesome for a lot of people, but clearly in this case we brought him grief rather than joy,” he told the Post. Gheller said that for next year the team would consider Meyer’s suggestions for more “empathetic design” — not pre-filling a picture, and offering a way to opt out before showing them a preview at all. Let’s see what happens next year. I don’t want to see anyone else’s FB slideshow, just as I never want to see ANYONE’S SLIDESHOW EVER, and I don’t want to watch my own. NO should be an option, and so rarely is with FB.
Your apartment fire was so festive!
ANYHOO. What I didn’t know until our colleague at RetractionWatch, Ivan Oransky, pointed out to us last week was that Meyer then apologized to Facebook! In a post called Well, That Escalated Quickly, he said that Gheller had reached out to him before the mass media coverage of the story (good SorryWatch approved behavior) apologizing and swearing to do better. But Meyer went on, “I am very sorry that I dropped the Internet on his head for Christmas. He and his team didn’t deserve it.”
Meyer then said that reactions like mine, positing that FB was run by callous little douches, were unfounded. “This is not something you can blame on Those Meddling Kids and Their Mangy Stock Options,” he wrote. How do we know what losses FB’s coders may or may not have suffered? We don’t. “So maybe dial back your condescension toward their lived experiences,” he noted. And more importantly, let’s consider this as a systemic programming problem, not as a whee-fun-to-mock-FB problem. Meyer gave another example, of a service called Think Up, run by friends of his — Anil Dash and Gina Trapani — who are the antitheses of brogrammers. And yet Think Up chirpily told Meyer his “most popular post” on Twitter last year was his daughter’s obituary. “Popular” was a poor word choice, and this too is an example of technology folk not considering the way a design choice works for all constituents and incidences. All all designers and programmers and marketers need to do better, and Meyer included himself in that number.
This is mensch behavior. I’m sorry I missed his post at the time; I fell into that typical Internet cesspool of being spittily outraged and then not checking back in post-outrage.
Cool jar!
So, belatedly: I think Gheller’s apology to Meyer was good and I think Meyer’s apology to Gheller and his team was extraordinary. No, Meyer didn’t have to apologize. No, he had nothing to apologize for. But it was humane of him to say he was sorry for the fallout from his post and the venom spewed at the app’s creators. Meyer was kind. He was civil. He showed repeatedly that he understood the challenges of building Internet things, and that his interest was not in shaming FB but in improving the user experience for anyone who’s suffered a loss. “Sorry the world attacked you” isn’t the same as “sorry if your feelings were hurt,” a construction we deplore. Meyer was building a bridge, not evading responsibility. He took extra responsibility, in fact. It would be nice to think all of us are capable of such civility online.
