For those of you who have a Facebook account (or two), you no longer have to look at messages and news feed that are grammatically incorrect. Facebook announced that it will start requiring users to specify their gender so that you don’t see messages like “Susan tagged themself in a photo.”
As Facebook grows in other languages, we are learning a lot about what the “Facebook Experience” is like for people around the world. One of the first challenges was getting words that are really long in other languages to fit on the screen properly. Recently, we’ve been figuring out how to deal with a new challenge—grammar.
Ever see a story about a friend who tagged “themself” in a photo? “Themself” isn’t even a real word. We’ve used that in place of “himself or herself”. We made that grammatical choice in order to respect people who haven’t, until now, selected their sex on their profile.
Previously, the status updates textbox had a permanent “is” so users have to complete a sentence that starts with something like “Susan is …” The funny thing is that not everyone completes the sentence properly so I get messages and updates like “Jenny is going to NYC. I’m so excited!” or “Joy is went to the museum yesterday.”
That problem has been fixed after Facebook removed the “is” from the status updates. Now, the gender ambiguity and incongruity will be fixed too!
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