It seems that the social networking site Twitter is facing new accusations, but this time it is not about protecting the privacy of individuals as it was in the past or even negatively influencing public opinion by not doing what is necessary to fight misleading news and rumors, but it is about racist accusations.
The social networking site Twitter indicated that it is investigating accusations that indicate the bias of its algorithm for cutting out portions of the images shown in the tweets, to ascertain whether it is related to ethnic bias for this mechanism after the emergence of a number of recent news indicating that this mechanism shows pictures of people Whites at the expense of black people, which sparked a storm of criticism against Twitter.
As soon as this news spread, users around the world tried to do this experiment, and the result was always similar, such as the test that showed the preference for the image of the majority leader in the US Senate, “Mitch McConnell” over the image of former US President Barack Obama, which confirmed that the problem exists at the level of the Twitter algorithm, it seems clear that the matter has a relationship with face recognition software, as many reports indicated in the past that this software is not very accurate while trying to recognize the faces of other races, especially blacks or Asians.
Liz Kelly of the Twitter outreach team said: “We tested bias before implementing the feature and found no evidence of racial or gender bias in our testing, but we clearly have more analysis to do. We will present our open source work for others to examine the problem.”
