Twitter announced on Friday that it would give a cash “bounty” to users and researchers to root out algorithmic bias on the social media platform.
The competition is inspired by the “bug bounty” programs some websites offer to discover security holes and vulnerabilities, according to Twitter executives Rumman Chowdhury and Jutta Williams.
Twitter previously launched an algorithmic fairness initiative, that was discarding an automated image-cropping system after receiving negative reviews. “We’re inspired by how the research and hacker communities helped the security field establish best practices for identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities to protect the public,” they wrote.
“We want to cultivate a similar community… for proactive and collective identification of algorithmic harms.”