Some Twitter users are pointing out that the automatic method the platform employs to display previews of images may be biased toward showing pictures of white people. Twitter agreed the issues was something it needs to work on.
On Saturday, user @bascule tweeted, “Trying a horrible experiment… Which will the Twitter algorithm pick: Mitch McConnell or Barack Obama?” Along with his words were two long, rectangular images. The first consisted of a picture of US Senate majority leader McConnell on the top, who is White, with a slender white rectangle in the middle, and a picture of former US President Obama, who is Black, at the bottom. The second featured the opposite, with Obama at the top and McConnell at the bottom. When a viewer looks at the tweet, a preview version of the images, which are side by side, shows just McConnell.
This came after another Twitter user, @colinmadland, on Friday noticed a similar preview result when he posted a picture that he said showed himself, a White man, side by side with a picture of a Black man with whom he attended an online meeting; Twitter’s preview defaulted to showing just the White man.
A number of other Twitter users responded to the post, some sharing the same or similar results. One got the opposite result after digitally adding glasses to Obama’s face and removing them from McConnell’s. A responding tweet from Anima Anandkumar, director of artificial intelligence research at Nvidia and a professor at the California Institute of Technology, pointed out that she had posted in 2019 about Twitter’s preview feature automatically cropping the heads off of images of women in the AI field, but not men.
