Twitter will open-source all of its code for recommending tweets to users by March 31, company owner and CEO Elon Musk said on Friday.
Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31st
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2023
Musk cautioned that the “algorithm,” as he called it, is overly complicated and isn’t even fully understood internally.
By making the code behind tweet recommendations available to anyone who wants to look at it, Musk is already anticipating that people will find flaws and things Twitter could have done better. The eccentric entrepreneur said that Twitter will endeavour to patch any issues as soon as people find them.
According to Musk, the current system for recommending tweets isn’t ideal. “We’re developing a simplified approach to serve more compelling tweets, but it’s still a work in progress,” Musk said. He said that this new system will be open-source as well.
In the meantime, Twitter hopes that providing code transparency will “lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality,” even though Musk admitted that it may be embarrassing at first. “Most importantly,” Musk said, “we hope to earn your trust.”
Twitter on Friday started rolling out a bookmark counter for tweets on iOS. This new counter sits alongside a tweet’s likes, retweets, and quote retweets numbers.
Last month, Twitter increased the max character limit for tweets from 280 characters to 4,000 for Twitter Blue subscribers. According to a recent report, Musk could find a replacement for himself as CEO of Twitter by the end of this year.
