An algorithm Twitter uses to decide how photos are cropped in people’s timelines appears to be automatically electing to display the faces of white people over people with darker skin pigmentation. From a report: The apparent bias was discovered in recent days by Twitter users posting photos on the social media platform. A Twitter spokesperson said the company plans to reevaluate…
Tag: racial bias
‘Landlord Tech Watch’ Site Lets You Report Landlords Using Tech To Screw Over Tenants
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A group of activists have released Landlord Tech Watch, a site that allows anyone to report where this “landlord tech” is being used and plot it on a map — like a version of Nextdoor that turns the tables to hold property owners and real estate companies accountable. The project is the effort…
Facebook Ignored Racial Bias Research, Employees Say
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: In mid-2019, researchers at Facebook began studying a new set of rules proposed for the automated system that Instagram uses to remove accounts for bullying and other infractions. What they found was alarming. Users on the Facebook-owned Instagram in the United States whose activity on the app suggested they were Black were…
Police Surveilled Protests With Help From Twitter-Affiliated Startup Dataminr
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Leveraging close ties to Twitter, controversial artificial intelligence startup Dataminr helped law enforcement digitally monitor the protests that swept the country following the killing of George Floyd, tipping off police to social media posts with the latest whereabouts and actions of demonstrators, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept and a source…
Racial bias is baked into algorithms doctors use to guide treatment
Biased algorithms wrongly adjust patients’ risk scores based on race. Source: https://www.livescience.com/racial-bis-health-care-algorithms.html
Microsoft Researchers Say NLP Bias Studies Must Consider Role of Social Hierarchies Like Racism
As the recently released GPT-3 and several recent studies demonstrate, racial bias, as well as bias based on gender, occupation, and religion, can be found in popular NLP language models. But a team of AI researchers wants the NLP bias research community to more closely examine and explore relationships between language, power, and social hierarchies like racism in their work. That’s…
Researchers Find Racial Bias In Hospital Algorithm
Black patients were less likely than white patients to get extra medical help, despite being sicker, when an algorithm used by a large hospital chose who got the additional attention, according to a new study underscoring the risks as technology gains a foothold in medicine. The Wall Street Journal reports: Hospitals use the algorithm — from Optum, UnitedHealth Group’s health-services arm…
Supreme Court To Consider Racial Discrimination Case Against Comcast
The Supreme Court will consider whether a black television producer can pursue racial discrimination claims against Comcast for declining to carry his programming channels on its cable system (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). The Wall Street Journal reports: The Comcast case stems from the cable operator’s decision not to carry Pets.TV, Recipes.TV and other channels from Entertainment Studios Networks Inc. The…
Disease Prediction Scores Based on DNA Have a Racial Bias, Study Finds
Scores for predicting disease risk based on genetics are on average almost five times less accurate for people of African ancestry, two times less accurate for East Asians, and 1.6 times less accurate for Hispanic or Latino Americans, compared to people of European descent, a paper published Friday in Nature Genetics has found. The paper… Continue reading Disease Prediction Scores Based on DNA Have a Racial Bias, Study Finds