Twitter says its image crops werent very biased, but is phasing them out anyhow

Twitter is phasing out its image cropping algorithm in favor of showing larger previews, and the company has announced that it’s been looking into accusations that the system was biased. It found that the crops were slightly biased towards certain races and genders, but Twitter’s main gripe seems to be that the algorithm doesn’t give users control.

Starting in 2018, Twitter started using the algorithm to crop images so they fit in its image preview boxes. The algorithm tries to determine what will be most visually interesting to a user so it can include it can include it in the preview, but some have accused it of favoring white faces over black ones. To determine if that’s the case, Twitter had some of its researchers produce a report...

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