What did Twitter’s ‘open source’ algorithm actually reveal? Not a lot.
Twitter said it was withholding code dealing with ads, as well as trust and safety systems in an effort to prevent bad actors from gaming it. The company also opted to withhold the underlying models used to train its algorithm, explaining in alast week that this was to “to ensure that user safety and privacy would be protected.” That decision is even more consequential, according to Messing. “The model that drives the most important part of the algorithm has not been open-sourced,” he tells me.
Musk’s original motivation to make the algorithm open source seemed to stem from his belief that Twitter had used the algorithm to suppress free speech. “One of the things that I believe Twitter should do is open source the algorithm and make any changes to people's tweets — if they're emphasized or de-emphasized —that action should be made apparent,” Musk said last April in an appearanceshortly after he confirmed his takeover bid.
But none of the code Twitter released tells us much about potential bias or the kind of “behind-the-scenes manipulation” Musk said he wanted to reveal. “It has the flavor of transparency,” Messing says. “But it doesn’t really give insight into what the algorithm is doing. It doesn't really give insight into why someone's tweets may be down-ranked and why others might be up-ranked.”the vast majority of researchers from accessing a meaningful amount of Twitter data.
"If you're actually interested in public oversight on something like a Twitter algorithm, then you would actually need multiple methods for oversight to happen” Hanna said. There is one aspect of Twitter’s algorithm that the GitHub code does shed some new light on, though. Messing points to a fileby data scientist Jeff Allen, which reveals a kind of “formula” for how different types of engagement are given priority by the algorithm. “If we take that at face value, a fav is worth half a retweet,” Messing writes. “A reply is worth 27 retweets, and a reply with a response from a tweet’s author is worth a whopping 75 retweets.”picture of what’s actually happening.
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