Facebook and mistakes make a perfect love story, yes you read that right. Since recently Facebook has committed another mistake and was forced to apologize for accidentally celebrating the evil Indonesian earthquake on Sunday.
Well, we shouldn’t shock as it’s not the first time the company has shown how bland it can be in the face of a natural disaster.
A 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Indonesia killing over 300 people and created a state of emergency since last month in the country. According to CNN, at least 20,000 people are still in need of assistance and rescue teams are still struggling to arrive at some areas devastated by the quake.
As you would expect, sympathetic Indonesians took to social media for showing their sympathies and hopes for the survival of those in the region. And Facebook took it totally wrong.
According to Herman Saksono on Twitter, this was the reason behind Facebook’s unusual and inappropriate reaction that got it in the wrong way.
Facebook‘s built-in word detection continued to shower the commenters with balloons and confetti by thinking that users were trying to congratulate something or someone.
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Facebook has since apologized for that, explaining the animation is automatic. A spokesperson told Motherboard:
“This feature (a text animation triggered by typing ‘congrats’) is widely available on Facebook globally, however, we regret that it appeared in this unfortunate context and have since turned off the feature locally.”
It is important to mention here that it’s not the first time Facebook’s been a bit poorly following a natural disaster. You must remember the last October when Hurricane Maria had devastated the island of Puerto Rico and more than 1,000 people were killed in this horrible incident.
It was the largest blackout in American history and at almost the same time, Mark Zuckerberg sought to show a new project Facebook was working on called Spaces.
The objective behind this move was to display how you could set the environment to be anything you wanted to be, Zuckerberg went to place himself in the fabulous world of storm-racked Puerto Rico. And that was the place where Mark did such pretty things like high-fiving his stage partner while standing on a flooded bridge in front of many destroyed homes.
It was an insensible display, and Zuckerberg had to take rapidly a U-turn, and he explained the “trip” to Puerto Rico was due to the company’s partnership with the Red Cross. Still, the whole event left a reasonably awful taste in everyone’s mouth.
Well, Facebook needs to be careful next time. Keeping the fact in view, it’s a basic feature of the site and should work properly.
