Popular micro-blogging site Twitter has unveiled a new bounty challenge that offers payouts of up to $3,500 (Sh380,000) for showing biases in its automatic image crops.
Back in September, a user revealed that Twitter’s picture-cropping algorithm on mobile had a racial bias, preferring to show white faces over black faces. To address the issue, Twitter decided to start displaying full images on the timeline instead of cropping them.
Now, Twitter hopes that giving teams access to its code and image cropping model will expose just why the algorithm is harmful.
“In May, we shared our approach to identifying bias in our saliency algorithm (also known as our image cropping algorithm), and we made our code available for others to reproduce our work,” Rumman Chowdhury, Director, Software Engineering at Twitter, said in a blog post on Friday.
Twitter’s first algorithmic bias bounty challenge Details
- $3,500 1st Place
- $1,000 2nd Place
- $500 3rd Place
- $1,000 for Most Innovative
- $1,000 for Most Generalizable (i.e., applies to most types of algorithms).
Those competing will have to submit a description of their findings, and a dataset that can be run through the algorithm to demonstrate the issue. Twitter will then assign points based on what kind of harms are found, how much it could potentially affect people and more.
Twitter says in its announcement blog that the competition is separate from its bug bounty program
