Facebook to use AI to stop telling you to invite dead people to your parties

Site will also try to stop telling people to say hello to dead friends on their birthday

(PA)

Facebook says it is using AI to stop telling you to invite people to your parties.

The company has is working hard to stop recommending that users get in touch with their dead friends on the site. Those reminders – which will still come up even if it has been told that a user has died – have been a serious source of distress for people who are nudged to speak to people who might recently have died.

Now the company has promised to do what it can to stop those reminders arriving. It said the new feature will make use of AI, though it did not explain why it was needed or how it will be used.

The new commitment came as part of a broad new set of changes that Facebook said would hope the site less painful for people helping to deal with the accounts of dead users. It will introduce new ways for people to pay tribute on someone's account, extra ways for people to manage the accounts of people who have since died, as well as the new feature which will use "improved AI to keep the profile of a deceased loved one from appearing in painful way", according to the site.

Facebook uses a whole variety of nudges to try and encourage people to chat on the site: on a person's birthday it might tell you to say hello to them, for instance, or when you're hosting an event it might prompt you to invite a person you speak to a lot. But upset has frequently been caused by the fact those reminders pop up even when Facebook has been told that the person has died, serving as a painful reminder as well as a strange and inappropriate reminder.

Facebook offers the opportunity to have an account "memorialized", which gives someone else control of it and ensures it is kept as a tribute to the person who has died, and that feature can now only be triggered by friends and families.

But even when that feature is activated, a person will still appear in Facebook's various suggestions. Now it will do what it can to stop that, Facebook said – though it did not commit to the fact those accounts will not appear, and said it would be relying on "AI" to stop it happening.

"Once an account is memorialized, we use AI to help keep the profile from showing up in places that might cause distress, like recommending that person be invited to events or sending a birthday reminder to their friends. We’re working to get better and faster at this," Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg wrote in an announcement blog post.

"We’ll continue to build on these changes as we hear more feedback. We hope Facebook remains a place where the memory and spirit of our loved ones can be celebrated and live on."