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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.
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.
But can it sort them by boob size?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Yeah, right. "Glitch..."
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
If that had been present before my marriage. And my second to last marriage.
> Facebook will also ask if you meant to type "female,"
I was underestimating this whole AI craze, but turns out it's pretty legit.
Other than work acquaintances about 90% of the people I have in my "friends" list are female.
For the statistically inclined, of the 89% about 70% are either females I have or females I would have sex with.
The rest are relatives of some kind or other. which are not included in the previous paragraph, well except your mom. /s
While I can understand wanting to look for photos of friends, what possible reason could someone have for only wanting to see pics of their male friends or female friends? If they have someone in mind, they can search for pictures of that person.
But I can think of precisely zero cases where I would want to discriminate which photos I wanted to see of my friends based on their gender.
So am I out to lunch here? Can someone explain why this should actually even be a thing?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You say "bug", I say "feature".
Now to update that for the 21st century:
I'm not exactly filing this glitch under "accidental".
This an artifact of some mouth-breathing troll brogrammer's passive aggressive sexual assault plans.
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.
Better known as 318230.
Possible reasons to do things are more common than jelly beans under sofa cushions. Dislodge the sofa cushion of your imagination, then stoutly hold forth your outstretched apron skirt to receive a giant payload.
Here's a starting point: people add search terms to narrow the field of search when seeking something you dimly recall, but where the precise contents (such as personal names) have slipped from mind.
If you're trying to recall the design of some cute top, "female friends and gay friends with flamboyant, effeminate style" is your winning ticket. But we're still five years away from machine learning being able to navigate "gay friends with flamboyant, effeminate style" so for now you leave that portion out.
'male' is a substring of 'female' any search for the string 'female' would not match 'male' but a search for the string 'male' would match 'female'
It couldn't be that simple could it?
You know, it's actually far more likely that this would have arisen if you'd restricted people from searching for pictures of females *who were not their friends* but didn't make the same restriction for males.
This could in fact be a feature intended to prevent harassment / stalking of women who haven't accepted you as a friend.