Twitter’s AI-powered cropping tool is bias toward excluding black people and men, according to new research from the social media platform.

After hearing feedback from users that the tool didn’t serve everyone equitably, Twitter said it would analyse its model again for bias.

Under analysis, if the model is demographically equal, there would be no difference in how many times each image was chosen by the company’s saliency algorithm.

‘Demographic parity’ means each image has a 50 per cent chance of being salient.

But the research found in comparisons of black and white individuals, there was a 4 per cent difference from demographic parity in favour of white people.

In comparisons of men and women, there was an 8 per cent difference from demographic parity in favour of women.

Twitter said that following the study it decided that “how to crop an image is a decision best made by people.”

In March, Twitter began testing a new way to display standard aspect ratio photos in full on iOS and Android, without the saliency algorithm crop.

“The goal of this was to give people more control over how their images appear while also improving the experience of people seeing the images in their timeline,” wrote Rumman Chowdhury, director of software engineering at Twitter, in a blog post. “After getting positive feedback on this experience, we launched this feature to everyone.”

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