
Racial bias in Zoom's and Twitter's algorithms erase black faces - ENOTTY
https://twitter.com/colinmadland/status/1307111816250748933
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Guthur
It's not racist and to say as such is just stupid. The model might be a poor
but it has no concept of race.

And actually think implying that the authors of the algo and model are racist
equally stupid.

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notadog
While I doubt that this was the intent of the programmers responsible, it
doesn't change the fact that people are being discriminated against because of
their skin color.

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neilsense
This is not racial discrimination, it's a bug with a piece of software. There
are many bugs with software, because behind it are human beings that are being
pressured in many ways to ship said software.

Behind all of this is a pretty badly tested library that someone took off
GitHub and dumped into Zoom. There is no ill-intent.

If we consider every little thing as racism, we remove the weight of the word
and what it actually should be used for. The end of that road being that
everyone cries racism for everything and we all become indifferent to hearing
the term.

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dwaltrip
It’s more than a simple bug. It’s a design flaw that results in mistreatment
for people of certain skin colors.

You are likely correct that the intent was not malicious. This is no excuse.
Throughout history, everyone believes they are doing the right thing or are
properly justified, even when heinous acts are being committed. We are master
story tellers, and we tell the most twisted stories to ourselves.

At the end of the day, the impact that our actions have matters a lot more
than our best intentions.

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notadog
Related Wired and NY Times articles linked further down the Twitter thread:
[https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-
recogni...](https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recognize-
black-faces-equally/) and
[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-
recogni...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-
arrest.html)

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bsanr2
We can do so much better than this

Racist algorithms, and faces that we miss

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chapium
Its easy to criticize this crappy, trash, algorithm. Before one declares
something trash, they had better have an alternative that fits the use case.

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smt88
The alternative is not to do it. Companies that produce these algorithms have
said not to deploy them against people.

You don't need to have something better in mind to criticize something.
Criticism alone can be useful if the endeavor didn't need to be attempted at
all.

