The company launched an investigation after it was found to be discriminating between black and white faces in cropping Twitter photos
By Rabindra Dhungel, 23 september 2020. The company has launched an investigation after Twitter’s picture-cropping algorithm found white skin to be preferable to black. When two photos with white and black faces were posted on a Twitter post, users found that only the white face of that post was visible on mobile phones most of the time. Twitter says it has also tested aspects of racial and gender inequality in the development of the algorithm. However, Twitter has acknowledged that much remains to be done.
The latest controversy erupted when Colin Madland, a manager at a Vancouver-based university, lost a colleague’s head in a zoom video conference. The software removed the black man’s head as part of the background. But when Midland took to Twitter, it also found that Twitter had cut off her friend in a mobile app preview and only showed her a picture. Even when he changed the structure of the picture, Twitter’s algorithm continued to show the same preview.