Twitter Bug Bounty Contest was recently launched. Most of the bug bounty programs that are run by tech companies are primarily focused on finding bugs, vulnerabilities, and security flaws. In contrast to that, Twitter has launched this Bug Bounty contest with a twist where security researchers will have to find algorithmic bias.
Twitter stated in a blog post that identifying bias in machine learning models is tough. Unintended ethical problems are occasionally discovered after they have already been revealed to the public. According to the social media platform, Twitter Bug Bounty Contest seeks to change that.
The Social Media platform said, “In May, we shared our approach to identifying bias in our saliency algorithm (also known as our image cropping algorithm), and we made our code available for others to reproduce our work. We want to take this work a step further by inviting and incentivizing the community to help identify potential harms of this algorithm beyond what we identified ourselves.”
What is the Twitter Bug Bounty Contest?
Twitter is re-sharing its saliency model, as well as the code used to create a crop of an image given a projected maximum salient point, and inviting users to create their evaluation. The goal is to prevent accidental problems from occurring when failures occur on “natural” photos that someone may reasonably share on Twitter. Or it could be deliberate, with failures prompted by doctored or adversarially modified visuals.
“We want you to surface harms affecting anyone from Twitter users to customers or Twitter itself. Point multipliers are applied for those harms that particularly affect marginalized communities since Twitter’s goal is to responsibly and equitably serve the public conversation,” explained Twitter.
The challenge will be open for entries till August 6, 2021, 11:59 pm PT.
Winners of the contest will be announced at a workshop hosted by Twitter on 8th August. The prizes for the event are as follows:
- $3,500 for 1st Place
- $1,000 for 2nd Place
- $500 for 3rd place
- $1,000 for Most Innovative
- $1,000 for Most Generalizable
For more details about the Twitter Bug Bounty Contest visit here.
