- Apr 24, 2005
- 265
- 0
- 0
Wal-Mart Stores is shutting down the automated system that creates movie recommendations on its shopping website after the system randomly linked a Planet of the Apes DVD to films about African-Americans including Martin Luther King Jr., the company said Thursday.
Wal-Mart said it had fixed the immediate problem by removing what it called the "offensive combinations" from a Web page on www.walmart.com advertising a boxed DVD set, Planet Of The Apes: The Complete TV Series.
Under "Similar Items," the page linked shoppers to four movies about the lives of the slain civil-rights leader, actress Dorothy Dandridge, boxer Jack Johnson and singer Tina Turner. It was manually changed by 5:30 p.m. CT to link shoppers instead to DVD sets of Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond and Star Wars.
USA Today
