This will be “incredibly embarrassing”
Elon Musk will soon give insight into Twitter algorithm
03/18/2023, 03:25 am
An algorithm determines which content you see first on Twitter. Elon Musk wants to reveal the secret behind it on March 31st. The Twitter CEO believes the disclosure will be “incredibly embarrassing” most of all. Why the tech billionaire is still daring to go on the transparency offensive probably has to do with allegations against himself.
Twitter owner Elon Musk appears to be making good on his promise to be more transparent about tweet recommendations soon. The algorithms used to select the contributions for individual users are to be disclosed on March 31, as the tech billionaire announced on Saturday night. As open source software, they will be able to be analyzed by programmers.
On Twitter, tweets can either be displayed in chronological order – or weighted by software designed to find interesting and relevant posts for each user. Musk had promised a long time ago that Twitter would disclose the mechanisms behind this selection. With the announcement, Musk now dampened expectations of the software. It is too complex and is not fully understood even by those responsible for the online service. “People will discover a lot of stupid things,” he wrote on Twitter. The transparency will be “incredibly embarrassing” at first, but should quickly lead to better recommendations.
Last month, a US report that Twitter had temporarily increased the reach of Musk’s tweets in the “For You” section prompted supervisors in Germany to take action. The Bavarian State Center for New Media (BLM) initiated the examination for a supervisory procedure. Musk denied that there was a deliberate increase in reach for his posts. It was just a software error that made the answers weighted the same as tweets. Users noticed a strikingly high number of Musk’s reply tweets among the recommended posts.
The CEO and Tesla founder, who took over the network for $44 billion at the end of October 2022 after a long back and forth, advocates the disclosure of the code in order to “above all gain trust,” as he concludes on Twitter. According to his own statements, Musk actually intended the purchase to strengthen freedom of expression and freedom of speech. But since the takeover, the tech billionaire has mainly made negative headlines with Twitter – for example, because of thousands of employees being fired, numerous blocked journalist accounts after critical reporting or verbal gaffes like against the renowned corona expert Anthony Fauci. As a result, some politicians, institutions and celebrities left the network in protest.