Twitter tries to fix problematic image cropping, not cropping more images

Twitter devised a potential solution to your image cropping problem: no more cropping. The company said on Wednesday that it is now testing a preview of the “what you see is what you get” image in the tweet’s composition box and experiment with displaying full-frame images. That way, the images will appear on the Twitter timeline with the same appearance as when the user was composing the tweet.

“Now testing on Android and iOS: when you tweeted a single image, how the image appears in the tweet’s composer is how it will look in the timeline – bigger and better,” wrote the company in its ad tweet about the new test appeal. Twitter also says it is testing the upload of a new 4K image on Android and iOS as part of a broader push “to improve the way you can share and view media on Twitter”.

With the new shift in image viewing, there should be fewer algorithmic surprises – such as those that several users drew attention to last fall, which showed how the company’s automated cropping tool often favored white faces over black ones. In many of these cases, irregularly-sized images shared on Twitter were automatically cropped behind the scenes using an AI-powered algorithm, but in ways that raised some worrying questions about how the software prioritized skin color and other factors.

Twitter at the time said that the neural network it uses for automated image cutting was tested for racial prejudice, and the company says it has found none. But he also admitted that he needed to carry out further analysis and refine his approach to avoid situations like this where even the appearance of bias was a possibility.

“Of course, we have more analysis to do. We are going to open the code of our work so that others can review and replicate, ” wrote Twitter communications led Liz Kelley to the aftermath of the controversy that went viral. “Just because a system does not have a statistical bias, it does not mean that it will not cause harm.” Kelley said that Twitter would depend “less on automatic cropping, so more often the photo you see in the Tweet composer is what it will look like in the Tweet.”

Parag Agrawal of Twitter, the company’s chief technology officer, later wrote a blog post investigating the problem at length, saying at the time that Twitter would be conducting “additional analysis to add more rigor to our tests” and that it was “committed to sharing our findings and … explore ways to open the source code of our analysis so that others can help hold us accountable. ”

Now, it seems that the solution proposed by Twitter is here, at least in the testing phase. Although tweets in standard proportions are identical when viewed in the compose window and displayed in the timeline, Twitter design chief Dantley Davis says that extra-wide or tall images will be cut in the center for those included in the test. Twitter did not share a concrete timeline for when this change could be sent live to all users.