One of the main critiques of Twitter is that the algorithm it uses to recommend tweets is a block box that seems to prioritize pushing leftist messages over what users of the bird app might actually want to see.
Now Elon Musk is again proving that he’s a friend of the average American instead of the special interests that might want to use and abuse Twitter’s code to push their message by pledging to make the source code open to the public so that it can investigate it and find out why Twitter is pushing what messages it’s pushing.
Elon made that titanic announcement in a two-part post on Twitter itself, saying:
Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31st
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!
We’re developing a simplified approach to serve more compelling tweets, but it’s still a work in progress. That’ll also be open source.
Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality. Most importantly, we hope to earn your trust.
The Daily Caller, giving some context on Musk’s announcement with a brief overview of the powerful interests he’s already infuriated and how he’s worked with journalists to expose what Twitter was up to before he took over, said:
Journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger all reported on censorship and shadowbanning carried out by the social media site based on documents released by Musk, who said that transparency on issues like the censorship of an October 2020 report by the New York Post was “necessary to restore public trust.”
Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter, multiple advertisers paused spending, while Democratic senators pushed for a Federal Trade Commission investigation into the social media site. Musk reinstated a number of Twitter accounts, including that of former President Donald Trump following a poll on the platform in which 51.8% of users backed the restoration of Trump’s account.
Fortunately for Elon, it looks like some of the changes he’s already made and hope that he’ll make more changes is already paying off, as he also posted recently that Twitter is growing quickly. Announcing that, he said:
This platform is growing fast!
Just exceeded 8 billion user-minutes per day … of the most influential, smartest people on Earth 😉
He also announced that Twitter would be prioritizing verified accounts in the comments to fight bots and spam, saying:
In the coming weeks, Twitter will prioritize replies by:
1. People you follow
2. Verified accounts
3. Unverified accountsVerified accounts are 1000X harder to game by bot & troll armies.
There is great wisdom to the old saying: “You get what you pay for.”
And, in what might be the biggest announcement, Elon announced that Twitter would be looking into who’s trying to manipulate public opinion on the platform, saying:
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In the months ahead, we will use AI to detect & highlight manipulation of public opinion on this platform.
Let’s see what the psy ops cat drags in …