Twitter's photo-cropping algorithm prefers young, beautiful, and light-skinned faces

Twitter has announced the results of an open competition to find algorithmic bias in its photo-cropping system. The company disabled automatic photo-cropping in March after experiments by Twitter users last year suggested it favored white faces over Black faces. It then launched an algorithmic bug bounty to try and analyze the problem more closely. The competition, which was organized with the support of DEF CON's AI Village, confirmed these earlier findings. The top-placed entry showed that Twitter's cropping algorithm favors faces that are "slim, young, of light or warm skin color and smooth skin texture, and with stereotypically feminine facial traits."