Twitter says its image-cropping algorithm was biased, so it's ditching it

Twitter has largely abandoned an image-cropping algorithm after determining the automated system was biased. Some users complained it had a preference toward showing pictures of white people in previews of tweets.

In a blog post on Wednesday, Rumman Chowdhury, a software engineering director for Twitter's machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability team, wrote that the company concluded the algorithm was biased after testing it for gender- and race-based biases. The post and an accompanying research paper detail how the cropping system, when tested on randomly linked images of people of various races and genders, favored White people over Black people and women over men, for instance. Twitter's conclusion comes months after the company said it would look into the algorithm, and serves as yet another example of how bias can creep into computer systems that are meant to perform tasks that humans are often uniquely good at doing.