Facebook's "Year In Review" feature is something to be expected around these months - when 2015 is on its way out to give way for the year 2016.
A staple feature around the holidays since 2012, Facebook's "Year In Review" allows users to look back on the things that happened in their life via the social media website.
In a year, a lot can happen - you may have found a great job or travelled the world but lost a loved one or experienced heartbreak. And although loss, grief and pain is a part of life, Facebook's "Year In Review" 2015 allows users to entirely avoid seeing things they posted on their timeline that remind them of such strife.
Last year, a blog post written by web design consultant Eric Meyer in which he pointed out the "inadvertent algorithmic cruelty" of Facebook's "Year In Review" feature. The blog post talked about how Facebook's celebratory review of the year showed him photos of his dead daughter - with confetti and dancing cartoons on the side.
"To show me Rebecca's face and say "Here's what your year looked like!" is jarring," Meyer wrote. "It feels wrong."
"Algorithms are essentially thoughtless. They model certain decision flows, but once you run them, no more thought occurs," he continued. "The Year in Review ad keeps coming up in my feed, rotating through different fun-and-fabulous backgrounds, as if celebrating a death, and there is no obvious way to stop it."
The blog post quickly became viral and perhaps it was due to this that Facebook now provides a set of filters to keep users from seeing photos of exes, memorialized profiles of people who died and people on their block list when they choose to view their "Year In Review" photos for 2015.
"We heard feedback last year that we need to do more to select the photos that are most enjoyable to people and make it easier for them to edit the photos they see and share in their Year in Review," a Facebook spokesperson said, The Verge reported.
"So we've applied a unique set of filters to Your Year in Review to reduce the chance we'll show you a photo you don't want to see," the spokesperson added. "And for the photos that our algorithms don't catch, we're giving people control over the photos in their Year in Review."
The same filter option was given to users for Facebook's "On This Day" feature last October, which drew flak over after it forced users to see bad memories from their years on the social media website.
