Why Twitter Stops Cropping Photos Completely

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Photos are fully displayed

Reading time: 2 minJulien Lausson Julien LaussonReading time: 2 min Julien Lausson Julien LaussonTwitter completely abandons its automatic photo cropping algorithm. Accused of favoring white people to the detriment of others, the tool had already been abandoned on Android and iOS. It will no longer be used on the web version either.

This is a seemingly anecdotal modification on Twitter, but which intends to avoid further blunders. In a message published on November 10, the social network announced that its photo visualization tool will no longer simply display a portion of the images in tweets, in the form of previews, but the snapshots in their entirety.

The announcement made by the community site concerns precisely the web version of its service, that is to say the one visited by Internet users from a computer or, more rarely from a mobile, but without going through the one of the dedicated apps. It follows a measure that has already applied to Android and iOS since the beginning of May 2021. Clearly, the display of images is now standardized.

A shocking selection of faces

The global abandonment of automatic image cropping on Twitter is a de facto sign of the defeat of the algorithm that was designed for this purpose in 2018. This one ci initially had to evaluate the part of the shot that seemed most relevant to highlight, according to obscure rules, by targeting a segment of the photo. However, putting it into practice has proven difficult and a source of controversy.

In the fall of 2020, Internet users discovered that the algorithm, when faced with photos displaying black faces and white faces, opted instead for a crop on the latter, thus putting them more in the spotlight than the others. Tests had shown that this preference returned even when the position of the white and black faces changed (one up and the other down, and vice versa).

This experiment with the photo of white senator McConnell and former black president Barack Obama started the controversy.

Source: Twitter/bascule

Investigating the subject, Twitter had admitted on its blog that "automatically cropping photos can potentially do harm", since the algorithm is led to choose a portion of the image, to the detriment of the others. On the other hand, the site was more cautious about the qualification of the problem, not recognizing any bias in the tool: “our analyzes did not show any racial or gender bias”.

If Twitter assures that its tool was not particularly biased, the fact is that the site preferred to put an end to it. He thus began to think of alternatives for the display of images and, in 2021, abandoned this cropping. First on mobile, therefore, and this time on the web.

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Front page photo credit: Nino Barbey for Numerama

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