Twitter to investigate apparent racial bias in photo previews

The first look a Twitter user gets at a tweet might be an unintentionally racially biased one.

Twitter said Sunday that it would investigate whether the neural network that selects which part of an image to show in a photo preview favors showing the faces of white people over Black people. 

The trouble started over the weekend when Twitter users posted several examples of how, in an image featuring a photo of a Black person and a photo of a white person, Twitter's preview of the photo in the timeline more frequently displayed the white person.

Trying a horrible experiment...

Which will the Twitter algorithm pick: Mitch McConnell or Barack Obama? pic.twitter.com/bR1GRyCkia

— Tony “Abolish (Pol)ICE” Arcieri