"Am I Never Going to Be Free of All This Crap?" Upsetting Encounters With Algorithmically Curated Content About Ex-Partners

Every day on social media, people see streams of content curated by algorithms that leverage their relationships, preferences, and identities. However, algorithms can oversimplify the complexity of people's social contexts. Consequently, algorithms can present content to people in ways that are insensitive to their circumstances. Through 19 in-depth interviews, our empirical study examines instances of contextually insensitive content through the lens of people's upsetting encounters with content about their ex-romantic partners on Facebook. We characterize the encounters our participants had with content about their exes, including where on Facebook it occurred, the types of social connections involved in the content, and participants' perceptions of why the content appeared. Based on our findings, we describe the "social periphery" – the complex social networks and data that enable inferred connections around otherwise explicit relationships – and discuss the design challenges that the periphery presents designers.