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Twitter owner Elon Musk announced on Friday, March 17, 2023, that he will lift the long-standing secrecy surrounding the algorithm used to recommend tweets. Musk said in his tweet that the coding used to recommend suggested posts to users will become “open source” at the end of March.
“People will discover a lot of silly things, but we will fix the problems as soon as we identify them!”
“Providing coding transparency will be very awkward at first, but it should lead to a rapid improvement in the quality of recommendations,” Musk said.
Musk stressed that the recommendation algorithm used in Twitter is very complex and not fully understood within the company.
“We are developing a simplified approach to serving more compelling Tweets, but this work is still a work in progress,” he said.
Making coding algorithms open source means that developers, including aspiring competitors, will be able to put their own spin on the algorithm, according to the underlying system of the software.
Since billionaire Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October, the platform has suffered disruptions, employee layoffs, and advertisers have stopped dealing with it due to a lack of content oversight.
But so far, no major alternative to Twitter has emerged, forcing world leaders, politicians, celebrities and companies to continue communicating through the platform for lack of other options.
Facebook owner Meta revealed earlier this month that it was working on a new network that would allow “text messaging sharing”, in a project seen as a potential competitor to Twitter.
