Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Confirms ‘Algorithms Unfairly Filtered Out 600,000 Accounts’

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that his company’s algorithms “were unfairly filtering 600,000 accounts, including some members of Congress,” from search results based on the type of followers they had.

Dorsey confirmed that 600,000 accounts were shadowbanned during his hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday.

“In the spirit of accountability and transparency: recently we failed our intended impartiality. Our algorithms were unfairly filtering 600,000 accounts, including some members of Congress, from our search auto-complete and latest results,” claimed Dorsey. “We fixed it. But how did it happen? Our technology was using a decision making criteria that considers the behavior of people following these accounts. We decided that wasn’t fair, and corrected. We‘ll always improve our technology and algorithms to drive healthier usage, and measure the impartiality of outcomes.”

“Bias in algorithms is an important topic. Our responsibility is to understand, measure, and reduce accidental bias due to factors such as the quality of the data used to train our algorithms. This is an extremely complex challenge facing everyone applying artificial intelligence,” he continued. “For our part, machine learning teams at Twitter are experimenting with these techniques and developing roadmaps to ensure present and future machine learning models uphold a high standard when it comes to algorithmic fairness. It’s an important step towards ensuring impartiality.”

Several Breitbart News employees were affected by the filtering, along with other conservative figures, before Twitter reversed the censorship.

Last month, Dorsey admitted during an interview that the company holds a “left-leaning bias,” but claimed Twitter enforces its rules fairly.