Twitter has published on GitHub the code that chooses the tweets that appear in your timeline and has published an entry on his blog explaining the decision and where he explains what he looks at the algorithm to determine which tweets appear in the timeline “For you” (or ‘for you, which will soon be prioritizing Twitter Blue payers) and how it sorts and filters them.
This decision to make Twitter’s code open to the public has always been a priority of its now CEO, Elon Musk. A year ago now Elon Musk said that he proposed to create an open source social network because he considered that Twitter did not respect freedom of expression. Then what he ended up doing was buying Twitter.
With the novelty announced a few hours after having the code visible to the whole world, Twitter has explained that “the recommendation process consists of three main stages.” First, gather “the best tweets from different recommendation sources“, then classifies them with “a machine learning model.” Finally, it filters out Tweets from people you’ve blocked, Tweets you’ve already seen, or Tweets that aren’t safe for work, before putting them on your timeline.
Three issues Musk cares about most
Now, apart from the obvious, there is something that attracts attention. As Jane Mnachung Wong, a well-known hacker famous for finding new features in apps from tech giants, has tweeted, Twitter’s algorithm specifically tags if the author of the Tweet is Elon Musk (“author_is_elon”) and you also found the tags democrat, republican and “advanced user”.
Twitter’s algorithm specifically labels whether the Tweet author is Elon Musk
“author_is_elon”
besides the Democrat, Republican and “Power User” labels https://t.co/fhpBjdfifX pic.twitter.com/orCPvfMTb9
—Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) March 31, 2023
Anyway, for the moment, as announced by Elon Musk himself on their twitter profile this posted now is “most recommendation algorithm” and said the rest would be posted in the future. He also announced that the hope is “that independent third parties will be able to determine, with reasonable accuracy, what is likely to be displayed to users.”
HE opened a discussion on Twitter Spaces where the company leader said that the plan is to make this system as robust as Linux“perhaps the most famous and successful open source project”. says the tycoon that providing transparency in code can be embarrassing at first, but should lead to a rapid improvement in the quality of recommendations.
In Genbeta | Elon Musk wanted to investigate why he has less impact on Twitter. He fired the engineer who told him that he is less interested
Image| xataka