© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: A keyboard placed in front of a Twitter logo shown in this illustration taken February 21, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
by Sheila Dang
(Reuters) – Twitter made public on Friday parts of the computer code that decides how the social networking site recommends content, and its owner, Elon Musk, added that the entire code would be available in the coming weeks.
The announcement will allow users and programmers to take a look at how it works and the possibility to suggest modifications to the algorithm.
“Over the next few weeks, we will be opening literally anything that contributes to displaying a tweet,” Musk said in a tweet on Saturday.
The company said in a blog post that it had uploaded the code to two repositories on the Github code sharing platform. They include the source code for many parts of Twitter, including the recommendation algorithm that controls which tweets users see on their timeline.
The move comes at the behest of Musk, its billionaire owner, who has said that transparency in the code would lead to greater trust among users and rapid improvements to the product.
It also serves to address common concerns among users and lawmakers, who are increasingly scrutinizing social media platforms about how algorithms curate the content users see.
Musk tweeted Friday that third parties should be able to analyze open source code and “determine, with reasonable accuracy, what is likely to be displayed to users.”
“No doubt, many embarrassing problems will be discovered, but we will fix them quickly!” he tweeted her.
Musk also said that Twitter will update its recommendation algorithm based on user suggestions every 24 to 48 hours.
On Friday, Musk and some Twitter employees held a session on Spaces, Twitter’s audio chat feature, asking users to bring recommendations and questions about how the platform’s code works.
One person asked why Twitter’s code seemed to classify users as Republicans or Democrats. A Twitter employee responded that it was an old feature that was not relevant to the platform’s recommendation system and that the company was looking to remove it.
The repositories on Github do not include the code that drives Twitter ad recommendations, the company said.
It also said it excluded code that would compromise user security or privacy, as well as details that would undermine efforts to prevent child sexual abuse material on the platform.
The news also comes after parts of Twitter’s source code were leaked on Github, which removed the code last week at Twitter’s request.
Twitter asked the US District Court for the Northern District of California to order Github to produce “all identifying information” associated with the Github account that had posted the leaked code, according to a legal filing.
