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Twitter Users Are Freaked Out That The Photo Preview Seems To Always Pick White People

It’s well known that Silicon Valley has had its fair share of accusations of racial bias. Now Twitter is under fire for the platform’s photo-cropping algorithm which some allege has its own racial bias.

Last week, Twitter user Tony Arcieri (@bascule) started playing around with how Twitter presents its image previews and found a disturbing trend they shared with the timeline: 

 

They took two photos that were the same size and flipped them. One had Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at the top of one image and at the bottom of the other. President Barack Obama was opposite McConnell.

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When the images were tweeted, Twitter’s algorithm chose to showcase both McConnell images. Arcieri added a thread to the tweet where they experimented with other aspects of the images to see if the auto-preview algorithm was being consistent.

The two men lined up once Arcieri inverted the photo colors.

Other users picked up on the tweet and started experimenting with the auto-preview on their own.

One user found the algorithm prefers images of President Obama when they are lighter.

The tweet went viral, with nearly 200k likes and retweets from notable Twitter users like Silicon Valley star Kumail Nanjiani.

Twitter leaders are now investigating why this was happening, with many people stating their disappointment in how the platform failed people of color and intention to fix the technology.

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