Twitter wants bounty hunters to help fix its image-cropping algorithm

Back in May, Twitter partially disabled an algorithm that cropped photos posted by users in ways that revealed certain biases. A company audit, and plenty of people on the internet, found the algorithm preferred white faces over Black faces, and women over men. Now, as part of the hacker conference DEF CON, which starts tomorrow, the company is offering a cash bounty to help fix the problem. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Rumman Chowdhury, director of Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency and Accountability at Twitter. Before that, she was founder and CEO of Parity, which helped other companies identify bias in their algorithms. Chowdhury says the cropping algorithm was based on data tracking where real people tended to look in photos.

Correction (Aug. 5, 2021): A previous version of this story misstated how Twitter’s algorithm was biased. The audio has been corrected.