Twitter to open-source its algorithm next week

Elon Musk has said that Twitter will make its algorithm open-source next week and improve it rapidly.  

A Twitter user had suggested about the microblogging site, “Now open source it, then we will be truly impressed.” Replying to the suggestion, Musk said, “Prepare to be disappointed at first when our algorithm is made open-source next week.”   

Last week, Musk had said that the micro-blogging platform will provide users the ability to adjust the algorithm to their “closer match in the coming months”.  

Meanwhile, the micro-blogging platform has announced from its @CommunityNotes account that the users will get a “heads up” if a Community Note shows on a Tweet they have replied to, liked or retweeted. “This helps give people extra context that they might otherwise miss”.  

Community Notes is Twitter’s crowd-sourced fact-checking program that checks on potentially misleading tweets. Musk lauded his Community Notes team over its recent announcement on rolling out a new alert that would make it easier for users to access additional information.  

Musk has been a long-time proponent of the idea that Twitter’s recommendation algorithm should be open sourced. He had earlier shared his views on the topic several times even before officially buying the company. Twitter's algorithms leverage these free, open components. After buying Twitter for $44 billion, Musk promised to make improvements to the popular social media platform, underlining free-speech and transparency he aims to make “the algorithms open-source to increase trust.”  

Musk also said in a TED talk in April 2022 that the Twitter algorithm that controls how tweets are advertised and demoted might be uploaded to GitHub, allowing anybody to use it.  

Open sourcing Twitter’s algorithm, some believe, could also help to keep regulators at bay, especially with increasing political interest in how social platforms’ content recommendations work.   

As such, Twitter has been under increasing pressure from others in the broader open-source community, including Twitter alternative Mastodon, which saw a surge in usage following Musk’s takeover of the microblogging network in October 2022.  

In November last year, Tumblr owner Matt Mullenweg said his company’s blogging platform would adopt the same ActivityPub protocol that now powers Mastodon. Soon after, Flickr CEO Don MacAskill began weighing a similar plan, as reported by TechCrunch.  

The idea is also a big boost to several governments’ efforts to resist tech giants like Google and Facebook in recent years. Recently, ByteDance owned TikTok came under the microscope to track the location data of specific US citizens, including journalists. Lawmakers have expressed concern that the app gives the Chinese Communist Party the ability to monitor and influence Americans. By open sourcing, Twitter may hope to avoid similar scrutiny, believe some. 

To be sure, Musk is not the first Twitter executive to suggest that open sourcing would be the best path forward. Notably, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey last year expressed regret that Twitter had ever been turned into a company in the first place, saying that, instead, “Twitter should have been developed as an open and verifiable protocol funded by a foundation”. Dorsey now is proceeding to build that vision with Bluesky, an open-source project spun out of Twitter that’s developing a decentralised social networking protocol known as ADX. 

Some experts, however, believe that revealing too much information about Twitter’s recommendation system may lead to security concerns. As Eerke Boiten, a professor of cybersecurity at De Montfort University noted that an open-source Twitter algorithm might assist attackers in understanding the strategies behind the promotion of certain items over others.