Twitter is making changes to its photo software after people online found it was automatically cropping out Black faces and focusing on white ones

Twitter is making changes to its photo cropping function after an investigation into racial bias in the software, the company said on Thursday. The announcement comes after users on the platform repeatedly showed that the tool -- which uses machine learning to choose which part of an image to crop based on what it thinks is the most interesting -- cuts out Black people from photos and centers on white faces instead. Tony Arcieri, a cryptography engineer, posted a series of tweets in mid-September showing how the platform's algorithm routinely chose to highlight the face of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is white, instead of former President Barack Obama's in multiple photos of the two. The experiment prompted others to try similar experiments with the same result, and led to the company launching an investigation into its systems shortly after. The social media company implemented its machine-learning-powered image cropping system in 2018.