Twitter Offers $3,500 to Users, Researchers for Finding Algorithmic Bias

Twitter said Friday it would offer a cash "bounty" to users and researchers to help root out algorithmic bias on the social media platform.

The San Francisco tech firm said this would be "the industry's first algorithmic bias bounty competition," with prizes up to $3,500.

Twitter executives Rumman Chowdhury and Jutta Williams revealed that the competition is based on the "bug bounty" programs some websites and platforms offer to find security holes and vulnerabilities.

"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 blog post.

"We want to change that." They said the hacker bounty model offers promise in finding 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 added.

Moreover, they affirmed that they wanted to cultivate a similar community for proactive and collective identification of algorithmic harms.

This step comes amid growing concerns about automated algorithmic systems, which, despite an effort to be neutral, can incorporate racial or other forms of bias.

In May, Twitter said it was scrapping an automated image-cropping system after its review found bias in the algorithm controlling the function.

The messaging platform mentioned that it found the algorithm delivered "unequal treatment based on demographic differences," with white people and males favored over Black people and females, and "objectification" bias that focused on a woman's chest or legs, described as "male gaze."