Facebook has created a chatbot to provide its staff with canned responses to awkward questioning from relatives during the festive season over the social network’s conduct.
The artificial intelligence (AI)-powered software, named Liambot, teaches workers official answers to criticism related to Facebook’s many recent scandals, according to the New York Times.
If a friend or family member asked how the company was dealing with hate speech, for example, they would offer information related to how Facebook was consulting with experts, had hired more moderators to police its content, was working on AI to identify hate speech, and that regulation was key to addressing the issue.
Fielding family topics
The tool, which can also suggest citing statistics from Facebook reports to back up points, was reportedly rolled out to staff shortly before Thanksgiving in the US on 28 November.
The answers are written by Facebook’s public relations department, and echo what its various executives have publicly announced in the past few years.
“Our employees regularly ask for information to use with friends and family on topics that have been in the news, especially around the holidays,” a Facebook spokesperson said.
“We put this into a chatbot, which we began testing this spring.”
While Facebook has previously provided its workers with guidance for potential tough questions from relatives over Christmas by sharing new releases in internet groups, it told the newspaper the chatbot was a more efficient way to address employee questions.
Facebook staff recently told managers they were concerned over how to answer quizzing over thorny issues.
Years of scandals
The company has been the subject of intense criticism in recent years over its user privacy policies in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, its reluctance to police political adverts on its platform, and its role in generating and perpetuating fake news to its billions of users worldwide.
Its security has also been condemned following a series of data breaches, including hundreds of millions of phone numbers linked to Facebook accounts found exposed in an easily-searchable online database in September and around 50m accounts being affected in a security breach of its network in September 2018.
