The California messaging service said the plan aims to offer
more transparency in its artificial intelligence and tackle "the potential
harmful effects of algorithmic decisions."
The move comes amid heightened concerns over algorithms used
by online services, which some say can promote violence or extremist content or
reinforce racial or gender bias.
"Responsible technological use includes studying the
effects it can have over time," said a blog post by Jutta Williams and
Rumman Chowdhury of Twitter's ethics and transparency team.
"When Twitter uses (machine learning), it can impact
hundreds of millions of tweets per day and sometimes, the way a system was
designed to help could start to behave differently than was intended."
The initiative calls for "taking responsibility for our
algorithmic decisions" with the aim of "equity and fairness of
outcomes," according to the researchers.
"We’re also building explainable ML solutions so you
can better understand our algorithms, what informs them, and how they impact
what you see on Twitter."
Williams and Chowdhury said the team would be sharing what
it learns with outside researchers "to improve the industry’s collective
understanding of this topic, help us improve our approach, and hold us
accountable."
The Twitter move follows a series of controversies at
Google's AI ethics team which resulted in the firing of two top researchers and
the resignation of a high-ranking scientist.
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