Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) has launched a competition to urge hackers to find and fix errors with one of its algorithms.
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Q2 2021 hedge fund letters, conferences and more
Fixing the bug
Through the bug bounty program, the social network wants to tackle racial and gender bias in its image-cropping algorithm, as reported by Metro. Last year, researchers said that it worked in a racist and gender-biased way.
“On photos attached to tweets that are larger or a different shape than the thumbnail proportions, the site automatically chooses what portion of the image to show in the preview.”
The company itself admitted that it chose white, male faces over other types and guaranteed that it would address the issue.
With the bug bounty program, Twitter is incentivizing hackers by offering a winning prize of $3,500 for finding out why the bias happens.
Twitter CEO Rumman Chowdhury wrote, “As part of our commitment to address this issue, we also shared that we’d analyze our model again for bias.”
“We want to take this work a step further by inviting and incentivizing the community to help identify potential harms of this algorithm beyond what we identified ourselves,’ Twitter wrote in a blog post announcing the challenge.”
Twitter’s Q2 earnings
Chowdhury asserted that the company is hurrying improvements on how the platform assesses algorithms for potential bias. With this, “we want to improve our understanding of whether ML is always the best solution to the problem at hand.”
“With this challenge, we aim to set a precedent at Twitter, and in the industry, for proactive and collective identification of algorithmic harms.”
In the meantime, Twitter’s Q2 earnings this year saw the tech giant blast analysts’ predictions and post its fastest revenue growth since 2014, as informed by CNBC.
The company registered $1.19 billion against $1.07 estimates, sending shares up by 5% in the premarket Friday.
“Twitter’s revenue grew 74% year over year in the quarter, according to a shareholder letter, with the company citing ‘a broad increase in advertiser demand’.”
Ned Segal, Twitter’s finance chief, said on a conference call with analysts: “If the creator is creating great content, and you see it in Super Follows, or it’s just a tweet and somebody puts money in their Tip Jar … Then we would make sure that part of the value that can be attributed to the creator where those dollars go to them and that we’re facilitating a transaction.”
Twitter is part of the Entrepreneur Index, which tracks 60 of the largest publicly traded companies managed by their founders or their founders’ families.
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