New block for Facebook pests

Filter will end annoying picture posts

WHETHER it’s pictures of their children, pets or five-star holidays, some Facebook users share every aspect of their lives.

But thankfully for those tired of seeing 20 pictures a day of their former classmate’s new baby, welcome help could soon be at hand.

At the moment, the only way of banishing those baby pictures is to ‘unfollow’ the friend – muting all their posts – or to take the socially controversial step of ‘unfriending’ them.

But Facebook is developing technology which would allow users to filter out certain types of their friends’ photos, for example of their cat, while still seeing their other posts.

The filter technology is based on that used in artificial intelligence, and was initially developed to help describe photos to the visually impaired. The socalled ‘deep learning’ system can identify what sort of image it is looking at, and is so sophisticated it can distinguish between different breeds of dog.

Facebook unveiled the technology at a London showcase on Wednesday, but it has yet to confirm when it will become available, or the specifics of how it might work.

Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vicepresident of engineering, said: ‘We can apply this technology to help people curate what they see and their experience on Facebook.’

The tool could also be useful for people going through relationship break-ups, fed up with seeing pictures of happy brides in white dresses, or potentially to censor pictures of people they have fallen out with.

Judging by the way other Facebook tools work, it is unlikely to alert the person posting too many annoying pictures.

It will also be wheeled out to help people with visual impairments get more out of the social network, by asking Facebook to describe their friends’ pictures to them.

Users would have to ask Facebook questions, such as ‘What is the baby standing on?’ or ‘What is the baby holding’ in order to elicit short answers.

During a demonstration, the technology was even able to identify images that were so out of focus that most humans would find them hard to identify.

‘Imagine being visually impaired. Now all of a sudden you are able to experience these things your friends share with you, on a whole other level,’ Mr Parikh said.

Earlier this month, Facebook said more than a billion people around the world now check into the social network every day.