Twitter kills automatic photo-cropping feature after complaints of racial bias

Twitter has deactivated the automatic image-cropping function on its platform, nine months after the social media platform first began receiving complaints the feature crops out Black faces from photographs.

Some Twitter users last September began noticing that when they posted a photo the featured both a Black person and a White person in the image, the Black person would often be cropped out of the picture in preview. Twitter, at the time, said it had tested the image preview cropping algorithm before the feature was launched, and didn't find any biases. But it later admitted "we've got more analysis to do." As it turns out, Twitter users were right. The algorithm that powers the artificial intelligence behind the image-cropping tool showed an "unequal treatment based on demographic differences," Twitter's director of software engineering Rumman Chowdhury wrote in a blog post for Twitter this week.