Hacker Community Gets Challenge From Twitter To Fight Racism

Twitter wants to eradicate racism on its platform. (photo: Sara Kurfe/Unsplash)

JAKARTA - Twitter has just announced a challenge for the hacker community that wants to do good. The company intends to eradicate racism on its platform.

As part of the DEF CON hacker conference starting on August 5, Twitter is taking the challenge to the hacker or coding community to help companies create algorithms that can root out racist photos.

For example, Twitter uploads a photo that is larger or different than the thumbnail proportions, Twitter's algorithms choose which part of the image to show in the tweet preview.

Calling all bounty hunters - it’s officially go time! We’ve just released the full details of our algorithmic bias bounty challenge which is open through August 6. For more details on the challenge, head over to our blog 👇 https://t.co/foXUdMGwRc

— Twitter Engineering (@TwitterEng) July 30, 2021

In September 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that this algorithm stands out more by showing a white face instead of a black face when an image contains both. Some describe this as an example of algorithmic bias, which is when racism is intentionally or unintentionally fed into computer-made decisions.

In response, Twitter shared how the algorithm works and said it would investigate the matter. But algorithmic bias bounty programs require some effort to solve this problem. Bug bounty often focuses on finding potential security breaches, and organizations pay bug bounty hunters to warn them of the problem.

This bounty program is specifically for the photo cropping challenges. But Twitter described it as "Twitter's first algorithmic bias bounty challenge."

Later, the company will award US$3,500 or equivalent to Rp50 million to the first winner who can identify the real causes of this bias, plus US$1,000 or Rp14 million each for the second most innovative and most generalized winner, while in third place will get 500 US dollars or the equivalent of Rp7 million.

"We wanted to take this work a step further by inviting and incentivizing the community to help identify potential harms from these algorithms beyond what we identified ourselves. With this challenge, we aim to set a precedent on Twitter, and in the industry, for proactive identification. and collectively from algorithmic hazards," Twitter said in its official blog, VOI quoted from Mashable, Sunday, August 1.