Twitter has responded to reports that its image cropping algorithm is biased to favor Caucasian people over Black people in the same photo.
Twitter was criticized last year after some users noticed the image cropping algorithm favored Caucasian people over Black people in the same photo.
In a new post on Twitter’s official blog, the leftist social media platform admitted its image algorithm favored white people and women.
“We tested for bias before shipping the model & didn’t find evidence of racial or gender bias in our testing,” a Twitter engineer wrote. “But it’s clear that we’ve got more analysis to do. We’ll continue to share what we learn, what actions we take, & will open source it so others can review and replicate.”
The statement was in response to a 2020 post comparing two images of Barack Obama and Sen. Mitch McConnell.
In both examples, the Twitter algorithm favored the senator over the former president — even though their positions are switched in the two photos.
Trying a horrible experiment…
Which will the Twitter algorithm pick: Mitch McConnell or Barack Obama? pic.twitter.com/bR1GRyCkia
— Tony “Abolish ICE” Arcieri ? (@bascule) September 19, 2020
In March, Twitter made a change to the mobile version of the platform that shows the full photo instead of a cropped image.
The image cropping algorithm will soon be removed from Twitter, Complex.com reports.
