Twitter tries to fix problematic image crops by not cutting more photos

Twitter has devised a possible solution to its problematic issue of image cropping: no more washing. The company said Wednesday it is now testing a “what you see is what you get” preview in the tweet writing box and experimenting with displaying full-frame images. This way, images will appear in the Twitter timeline, just like when the user compiled the tweet.

“Now tested on Android and iOS: if you tweet a single photo, how the image appears in the Tweet composer, this is what it will look like on the timeline – bigger and better,” the company wrote in its tweet about the new function test. . Twitter also says testing new 4K footage on Android and iOS is being tested as part of a broader push “to improve how you can share and view media on Twitter.”

With the new change in image preview, there should be fewer algorithmic surprises – such as those brought to the attention of several users this past fall, which showed that the company’s automatic cutting tool favors white faces rather than black faces. In many cases, irregular-sized images shared on Twitter were automatically cut behind the scenes using an AI-powered algorithm, but in ways that caused problems about how the software prioritized skin color and other factors.

Twitter said at the time that the neural network it uses for automatic image editing had been tested on racial bias, and the company claimed it had found nothing. But it also conceded that it needs to be further analyzed and the approach refined to avoid such situations where even the occurrence of prejudice is possible.

‘It’s clear we need to do more analysis. We open source our work so that others can review and repeat it, ” wrote Twitter communication leads Liz Kelley in the wake of the controversy going viral. “Just because a system does not show statistical bias does not mean that it will be harmed.” Kelley said Twitter will “rely less on auto-cutting, so the photo you see in the Tweet composer is what it will look like in the Tweet.”

Twitter, Parag Agrawal, chief technology officer of the company, later wrote a blog post in which he thoroughly investigated the matter, saying that Twitter at the time would do an “additional analysis to provide further testing to our tests” and that he ” was committed to sharing our findings and … exploring ways to open-source our analysis so that others can help hold us accountable. ”

It now looks like Twitter’s proposed solution is here, at least in a testing phase. While tweets in standard aspect ratios will be identical if previewed in the writing window and displayed on the timeline, Twitter’s head of design, Dantley Davis, says extra wide or long images will be the centerpiece for those included in the test. Twitter has not shared a concrete timeline for when this change can be pushed directly to all users.