Elon Musk has announced that the Twitter source code which is used for recommending tweets on people’s feeds is going to be open-sourced. He said the code will be visible to the public at the end of this month. Interestingly, he admitted that the algorithm is overly complex and not fully understood within the company.
Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31st
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2023
The new CEO of Twitter went on to say that providing the code publicly will be “incredibly embarrassing” at first but that the quality should improve as people inspect it and suggest improvements. By making the code public, Twitter is hoping that it can help to restore some trust between the company and its users.
Our “algorithm” is overly complex & not fully understood internally. People will discover many silly things , but we’ll patch issues as soon as they’re found!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2023
We’re developing a simplified approach to serve more compelling tweets, but it’s still a work in progress. That’ll also… https://t.co/uxxJe3RT36
While the tweet recommendation code is being made public, Musk revealed that the company is working on a simplified alternative for serving “more compelling tweets”. This code will also be open-source. It’s not known whether the company will keep both implementations or eventually scrap one – it could be interesting to see which one remains if it does turn into a battle.
Twitter already has a lot of code up on its GitHub page, Musk didn’t clarify where it would be hosting the open-source Twitter code for recommending tweets but there’s a good chance it’ll be on GitHub.