Facebook Needs to Fix Its "Your Year on Facebook" Review for Users

Every year in December Facebook rolls out its "Year in Review" feature (this year called "Your Year on Facebook") to its users. For those unfamiliar with the feature, it allows users to choose timeline posts, photos, and other things from the user's past year on Facebook, creating what could be described as a "highlights video" of the year. Now for many people this will means photos of a child's graduation, the birth of a grandchild, the first photos from a new job, or other happy events. Unfortunately, 2018 was not a particularly happy year for many people. In my case, 2018 will always be the year that my beloved Vanessa Marquez died. Given my post announcing her death got more reaction than any other post I made all year, one would think Facebook would let me choose it to be featured in my "Year on Facebook" video. After all, it not only addresses the defining moment of 2018 for me, but it addresses one of the most important events in my entire life. Sadly, Facebook does not include it among the posts I could choose to be featured in my "Your Year on Facebook" video. In fact, from all appearances, Facebook excluded any posts that received "sad" reactions from other users.

To say I am very angry with Facebook would be an understatement. To me it is as if they are saying that Vanessa's death was not the most important thing to happen during my year and that Vanessa did not matter. To me excluding any and all posts in which I addressed her death is an act of callousness and cruelty, however unintentional it was. I complained to Facebook several times and demanded that they fix it so that I could include one of the posts in which I addressed her death. I finally gave up, made a screenshot of one of the posts in which I address Vanessa's death, and uploaded it to my video as a photo. I really should not have had to have gone to all that trouble just to insure my "Your Year on Facebook" video was an accurate representation of what 2018 was for me.

Now in some ways I can understand why Facebook chose to exclude any posts about sad events in people's lives. Some of you might remember the controversy in 2014 when Facebook's "Year in Review" included a photo of an individual's recently deceased daughter, a photo of an individual's dog who had died that year, and a photo of a person's apartment that had burned, among others. Many of these people were upset that Facebook's algorithm chose to feature these events in their "Year in Review" videos, reminding them of tragedies that had occurred in their past year. I can certainly understand that. Everyone grieves in their own way. That having been said, the key words are "Facebook's algorithm chose to feature these events". It seems to me that Facebook could set their algorithm up so that it would not automatically feature sad posts in the initial editing stage of the video, but make it so that those posts would still be available for those of us who do want to feature them in our "Your Year on Facebook" videos.

Now, as I said, I can understand why some people might not want to be reminded of the tragedies that have happened in their past year, but I am not one of those people. I wanted to acknowledge in my "Your Year in Facebook" video that I lost the dearest person in my life. To me, failing to acknowledge Vanessa's death in my "Your Year on Facebook" video would be inherently dishonest. It would be a misrepresentation of what 2018 has been for me. While I managed to include one of the posts in which I reference Vanessa's death in my "Your Year on Facebook" video by taking a screenshot of it, I should not have had to. I should have been able to choose one of the posts in which I acknowledged her death as the post featured in the video. I am hoping that Facebook will yet fix my "Your Year on Facebook" video so that I can include the relevant post. I have always faced my grief head on and I am not going to stop because Facebook wants to pretend 2018 was all sunshine and lollipops for me.