What disturbs me the most are colleagues who said it was my fault since I hadn’t shared my grief on social media, and algorithms could not learn (I work in data « science »). As if targeted advertising was a law of Nature and there was nothing we could do about it. Just deal with it. And blame yourself for not showcasing your pain in front of hundreds of people.
The issue with algorithms is not that these events are statistically unlikely (unfortunately). They just have memory, enough memory to be accurate. So the day happy messages are replaced with the word « death », it hasn’t had the time to learn baby was not there anymore. There may be ways to improve that, but I bet you’d be trading accuracy for the remaining 95% people. Guess what version wins at a business meeting?
I’m not blaming colleagues who write these algorithms. They didn’t know this could happen, they didn’t think about it before this happened to me. We’re all math and CS geeks priding ourselves in [insert your metric here] score above the 90% mark, and that’s all we optimize for. I’ve heard a joke once that the difference between science majors and humanities major was that scientists build the atomic bomb, humanities major explain to them why it’s not a good idea to use it. Targeted advertising is not as bad as the atomic bomb, of course, but you get the idea.