I Watched Elon Musk Kill Twitter's Culture From the Inside
Rumman Chowdhury The Atlantic
Elon Musk. (image: CNN)
This bizarre episode in social-media history proves that it’s well past time for meaningful tech oversight.
I joined Twitter in 2021 from Parity AI, a company I founded to identify and fix biases in algorithms used in a range of industries, including banking, education, and pharmaceuticals. It was hard to leave my company behind, but I believed in the mission: Twitter offered an opportunity to improve how millions of people around the world are seen and heard. I would lead the company’s efforts to develop more ethical and transparent approaches to artificial intelligence as the engineering director of the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability (META) team.
In retrospect, it’s notable that the team existed at all. It was focused on community, public engagement, and accountability. We pushed the company to be better, providing ways for our leaders to prioritize more than revenue. Unsurprisingly, we were wiped out when Musk arrived.
He might not have seen the value in the type of work that META did. Take our investigation into Twitter’s automated image-crop feature. The tool was designed to automatically identify the most relevant subjects in an image when only a portion is visible in a user’s feed. If you posted a group photograph of your friends at the lake, it would zero in on faces rather than feet or shrubbery. It was a simple premise, but flawed: Users noticed that the tool seemed to favor white people over people of color in its crops. We decided to conduct a full audit, and there was indeed a small but statistically significant bias. When Twitter used AI to determine which portion of a large image to show on a user’s feed, it had a slight tendency to favor white people (and, additionally, to favor women). Our solution was straightforward: Image cropping wasn’t a function that needed to be automated, so Twitter disabled the algorithm.
