At around x-mass / new year, Facebook flashed a message on my wall which said "in 2017, you received 0 birthday wishes". (Screenshot reported by others https://goo.gl/images/YWfsqb).
I thought it was amusing since it sounded like a bug, it looked like the engineer forgot to account for the special case where wishes == 0. However, putting your comment into perspective, I now think it was most likely a well-calculated tactic, perhaps generated by an AI as you suggested and I guess it wouldn't be shown unless it was A/B tested.
Interestingly, the message was shown around xmass / new year, where people tend to be more vulnerable to suicide / self harm.
At around x-mass / new year, Facebook flashed a message on my wall which said "in 2017, you received 0 birthday wishes". (Screenshot reported by others https://goo.gl/images/YWfsqb).
I thought it was amusing since it sounded like a bug, it looked like the engineer forgot to account for the special case where wishes == 0. However, putting your comment into perspective, I now think it was most likely a well-calculated tactic, perhaps generated by an AI as you suggested and I guess it wouldn't be shown unless it was A/B tested.
Interestingly, the message was shown around xmass / new year, where people tend to be more vulnerable to suicide / self harm.