Twitter drops its image-cropping algorithm after finding it excludes Black people and women

Twitter is scrapping its image cropping algorithm after confirming the feedback raised by several users on the platform that the tool is biased against black people and women. The "saliency algorithm," introduced by Twitter in 2018, was developed to enable users to crop images and improve consistency in the size of photos in their timelines, so that they can see more Tweets at a glance, it noted in a blog post. Trained using human eye-tracking data, the company said the machine learning (ML) algorithm works by assigning "saliency scores" to different points in an image and determining where a person might want to see first within a picture in order to crop an image to an easily-viewable size. However, the recent analysis, conducted by researchers including Twitter's ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability (META) team, found that when the algorithm crops images it has an 8 per cent bias in favor of women, and 4 per cent in favour of white people. The results of the analysis also revealed a 7 per cent difference from demographic parity in favour of white women compared to black women, and a 2 per cent bias in favour of white individuals among men.