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After Helping Trump Win, Facebook Tells Us All We’re Dead

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BARNSTAPLE, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 28: Headstones for the relatives of the Bebo founder and tech entrepreneur Michael Birch who has made a multi-million pound investment in the village he used to visit as a child, are seen in the churchyard on September 28, 2016 near Barnstaple, England. The Californian-based tycoon, whose great-great-grandfather Job Andrew, built Woolsery village shop and which remained in the family until it was sold in 1961, was said to be saddened at the decline of Woolsery in North Devon where his ancestors lived since 1700 and decided to buy reopen the fish and chip shop and the derelict pub and old manor house hotel. The pub and hotel are currently being restored and will open next year. Job Andrew, Mr Birch's great-great grandfather, built Woolsery village shop, which remained in the family until it was sold in 1961. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

This afternoon, an untold number of Facebook users logged into the social network and learned that they and all their friends are dead. I am still alive—thank God, thank Zuckerberg—but I am devastated to report that my colleague Brian Josephs, who is sitting next to me, listening to Mary J. Blige as I write this, has passed on to the other side. I asked Brian, who is totally, extremely dead, if he’d let me share a screenshot of his Facebook page in this post, and dead, dead Brian was kind enough to agree. His Facebook page looks like this:

After Helping Trump Win, Facebook Tells Us All We're Dead

The “Remembering…” messages seem like a random bug, and they’re not affecting everyone. When I go to Brian’s profile page, it doesn’t say anything about him being dead, which is weird, because he is. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is also dead. So far, Facebook has not publicly addressed the bug or the leadership void left by the departure of its CEO.

https://twitter.com/stevekovach/status/797177651261751296

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At New York magazine’s Select All blog, Max Read made a convincing case that Facebook played a role in electing Donald Trump. The platform has an enormous audience, and has supplanted traditional journalism outlets as a primary source of news for many of its users. Despite this, it is unwilling or unable to take basic steps to disseminate the news responsibly: fake news “satire” articles regularly go viral—including those, as Read notes, that falsely claimed the pope endorsed Trump and that Hillary Clinton purchased millions of dollars worth of illegal weapons.

Now, it is telling us that we are dead, at a time when, though many of us might be fantasizing about the afterlife, we are very much alive.

Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s VP of product management, acknowledged in a statement yesterday that fake news on Facebook is a problem. “In Trending we look at a variety of signals to help make sure the topics being shown are reflective of real-world events, and take additional steps to prevent false or misleading content from appearing. Despite these efforts we understand there’s so much more we need to do,” he wrote.

I agree that there’s a lot more for Facebook to do, and if Brian were still here with us today, I’m sure he’d say the same thing.

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