Twitter stops cropping photos in response to criticism
Twitter has created a potential solution to the image cropping issue that is to stop it.
The company said: It is now testing an image preview what you see is what you get inside the tweet composing box and a full-frame image viewing experience.
Images appear this way in Twitter's timeline as they actually appear when the user was writing the Tweet.
And the company wrote in a tweet announcing the new feature test: Test now on Android and iOS:
When you tweet one photo, it appears within the timeline as it did in the composer of the tweet.
Twitter also says:
It's testing uploading 4K images via Android and iOS as part of a broader push to improve how media is shared and viewed across the platform.
And with the new change in image preview, there should be fewer algorithmic surprises, like the one that showed last fall how the company's automated cropping tool often preferred white faces to black faces.
In many of these cases, photos shared on Twitter were cropped automatically using an AI-powered algorithm, but in ways that raised questions about how the software prioritizes skin tone and other factors.
The company said at the time:
The neural network it uses to crop images has been tested for racial bias, and the company claims it has found nothing.
But she also admitted that she needs to do more analysis to avoid situations like this where even the emergence of bias is a possibility.
In the wake of the widespread controversy, the platform wrote:
Obviously, we have a lot more analysis to do, and open the source of our work so others can review.
She explained that it relies less on automatic cropping, so the image you see in the author of the tweet is often what it looks like in the tweet.
Twitter's suggested solution appears to be to stop cropping images, at least in the testing phase.
While Tweets fit for a standard aspect ratio are identical when previewed in the compose window and displayed in the timeline, Twitter's chief design officer says: Images that are too wide or tall included in the test are cropped in the middle.
Now testing on Android and iOS: when you Tweet a single image, how the image appears in the Tweet composer is how it will look on the timeline –– bigger and better. pic.twitter.com/izI5S9VRdX
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) March 10, 2021