Twitter’s chief design officer Dantley Davis has apologized for the company’s photo-cropping algorithm, which gives preferences to faces of white people. The story started after social media users noticed that the algorithm constantly left out the image of former president Barack Obama, which also contained an image of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Users first thought that Twitter was biased against the Democratic party. People changed the color of Obama’s tie to red (associated with the Republican party), but the result was the same.
Then users thought that the problem was with the background and did several tests, but again the algorithm gave preference to a white person.
Following a number of tests netizens came to the conclusion that the Twitter and it algorithm was racist.
Chief Design Officer Dantley Davis said the incident was undoubtedly Twitter’s fault and said the issue would be fixed soon.
This is not the first time that tech companies have been accused of political incorrectness. Most recently Zoom Video Communications was accused of racism after its videotelephony software, which has become extremely popular during the coronavirus pandemic, sometimes erased black faces.
The incident was blamed on poor face recognition systems.
In June, Microsoft’s artificial intelligence in charge of editing stories on its news website was blamed for mixing up two multiracial women in an article about racial inequality. In recent years, chatbots developed by Microsoft glorified the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, and criticized the Quran, the central religious text in Islam.