Facebook Uses AI to Determine User Death

Facebook plans to use artificial intelligence to help it be more sensitive of its members’ feelings when it comes to death of a friend or family member. In the past, Facebook might have allowed Memories to popup, send Birthday reminders and more. The results were not always positive for some folks.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg recently announced that the platform’s use of artificial intelligence will help it determine when someone has died. In doing so, it will stop sending these kinds of notifications. Details were scarce as to how the platform would do this, “but a Facebook spokesperson told NPR that the company will look at a variety of signals that might indicate the person is deceased.”

The new feature “is part of Facebook’s continuing attempts to deal with death,” reports NPR, adding that “With more than 2 billion active users, the social media company also has millions of users who will never be active again.” 

As we detailed in our an earlier blog post, in 2015 Facebook created a way for users to to designate a Legacy Contact and Memorialize a page after someone has passed away. You can read about it HERE.