After Elon Musk suggested the release of Twitter’s recommendation algorithm to the public almost a year ago, the company has now released the source code on GitHub.
Musk expressed his hope that users would identify potential flaws in the code and help improve it during a conversation on Twitter Space.
According to Musk statement “Our initial release of the so-called algorithm is going to be quite embarrassing and people are gonna find a lot of mistakes but we’re going to fix them very quickly”.
The code that was released on Friday pertains solely to the way tweets are displayed in Twitter’s “For You” feed.
The underlying code for Twitter’s search algorithm and the way content is displayed on other areas of the platform were not made public. In spite of this, Musk confirmed that the search algorithm would be made available as open-source by the company in the future.
The company’s blog post outlines the process of its recommendation algorithm, such as filtering and ranking. Despite this, users have already been exposed to captivating details in the code, such as how Twitter’s algorithm designates Elon Musk as the tweet’s author.
During a Twitter Space, a question was asked about Twitter’s algorithmic categorization of users as Republicans, Democrats, Power users, and Elon Musk. The categorization, particularly the division of users into political affiliations, was disagreed by Musk, who stated that it was not logical. The Twitter engineer explained that the categories were used for statistical tracking purposes and were not related to the algorithm.
Musk was taken aback when he discovered that he had his own category, and the engineer did not provide any explanation for this.