Facebook Glitch Lets You Search For Pictures of Your Female Friends, But Not Your Male Ones (thenextweb.com)

Belgian security researcher Inti De Ceukelaire has found an unusual glitch in Facebook's search function. Facebook lets you search for photos of your female friends, but refuses to let you look up pictures of your male friends. The Next Web has managed to replicate the glitch across several Facebook accounts. "When you type 'photos of my female friends' into the search bar, Facebook will return a seemingly-random selection of photos from your female friends," reports TNW. From the report: Switching out "female" with "male" returns something completely different. Instead of pictures of friends from within your social network, you're instead shown a selection of pictures from across the social network. In our experience, these came from accounts and groups we did not follow. Facebook will also ask if you meant to type "female," assuming you mistyped your query.

If you're feeling an overwhelming sense of deja vu, you're not alone. The predecessor to Facebook was a deeply unsavory site called Facemash that allowed Harvard University students to rate their female colleagues based on perceived physical attractiveness. It's a far cry from the now-hugely popular social network site, used by millennials and grandparents alike. Facebook has desperately tried to shed this deeply questionable part of its history for something more saccharine and innocuous. [...] The main difference though is that this is almost certainly an innocent mistake, rather than the product of dorm-room shenanigans.

Comments

There is different functionality here

[Dan East]

I just spent some time testing this. I see two things going on. One is that the frequent search terms are definitely biased towards searching for female photos. This may be legit and simply represents what people search for most.
Here are the search suggestions when I type "photos of my":
photos of my female friends
photos of my friends
photos of my female friends in bikinis
photos of my boyfriend
photos of my girlfriend
photos of my female friends this month
photos of my friends from this month
photos of my wife

There is, however, most certainly an actual difference in the functionality between searching for "photos of my female friends" and "photos of my male friends". When I search for the female friends, I see a search result box titled in bold text "Photos of my female friends" and it does indeed contain pictures of my female friends. Beneath this box is another result box titled just "Photos" with random posted photos (4 of the 6 are of females, but not from my friends).

Now, when I search for "photos of my male friends" it does not have a results box that says "Photos of my male friends" at all, and instead only has the generic "Photos" box with photos from random posts (and two have men in them along with females, and one is only of a female - however none is of just a male).

So there is definitely a difference in actual functionality here, at least from my account as a male. It was implemented to function in this way.