Twitter to offer ‘bounty’ to find algorithmic bias

WASHINGTON: Twitter said Friday it would offer a cash “bounty” to users and researchers to help root out algorithmic bias on the social media platform.

The San Francisco tech firm said this would be “the industry’s first algorithmic bias bounty competition,” with prizes up to $3,500.

The competition is based on the “bug bounty” programs some websites and platforms offer to find security holes and vulnerabilities, according to Twitter executives Rumman Chowdhury and Jutta Williams.

“Finding bias in machine learning models is difficult, and sometimes, companies find out about unintended ethical harms once they’ve already reached the public,” Chowdhury and Williams wrote in a blog post.