Twitter to Offer ‘Bounty’ to Find Algorithmic Bias

Twitter mentioned Friday it could supply a money “bounty” to customers and researchers to assist root out algorithmic bias on the social media platform.

The San Francisco tech agency mentioned this may be “the industry’s first algorithmic bias bounty competition,” with prizes as much as $3,500.

The competitors is predicated on the “bug bounty” packages some web sites and platforms supply to seek out safety holes and vulnerabilities, based on Twitter executives Rumman Chowdhury and Jutta Williams.

“Finding bias in machine learning models is difficult, and sometimes, companies find out about unintended ethical harms once they’ve already reached the public,” Chowdhury and Williams wrote in a weblog put up.

“We want to change that.”

They mentioned the hacker bounty mannequin provides promise to find algorithmic bias.

“We’re inspired by how the research and hacker communities helped the security field establish best practices for identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities in order to protect the public,” they wrote.

“We want to cultivate a similar community… for proactive and collective identification of algorithmic harms.”

The transfer comes amid rising considerations about automated algorithmic programs, which, regardless of an effort to be impartial, can incorporate racial or different types of bias.

Twitter, which earlier this 12 months launched an algorithmic equity initiative, mentioned in May it was scrapping an automatic image-cropping system after its evaluate discovered bias within the algorithm controlling the operate.

The messaging platform mentioned it discovered the algorithm delivered “unequal treatment based on demographic differences,” with white individuals and males favored over Black individuals and females, and “objectification” bias that centered on a girl’s chest or legs, described as “male gaze.”