What does the code actually reveal? Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, an assistant professor of public policy at UCLA, said via email that its technical approaches are “pretty standard these days.” He told me, “It is not surprising, for example, that a social graph, community detection, and embeddings are used.” And Twitter still hasn’t provided a look into the larger AI models that work beneath the surface, nor the data they are trained on. When I emailed Twitter’s press email asking for comment about its supposed push for transparency, I received an auto-reply containing a single poop emoji-part of the CEO’s new approach to media inquiries. The code and accompanying blog post are missing context that would fully explain why you do or don’t see any given tweet, and Musk has also made a number of decisions that reduce transparency, and overall accountability, in other respects.
Researchers told me that the code is notable simply by virtue of its existence-they haven’t seen such a release from major social platforms previously-but said it has significant limitations. The move was unprecedented, but this probably won’t go down as a great day in the history of algorithmic transparency. The company hailed the move as the first step toward a “ new era of transparency.” In a Twitter Spaces conversation, the platform’s CEO, Elon Musk, said the goal was to build trust with users: How else, he asked, would you know if the algorithm was “subject to manipulation in ways that you don’t understand,” whether that be from code errors or state actors? It made public the source code for its “For You” page, and published a blog post from its engineering team explaining how the recommendation system broadly works. social-media company, Twitter, posted part of its algorithm for anyone to see.
They generally operate as black boxes, hidden from academic researchers and the public, despite a push from notable figures in tech and politics to make them more transparent.īut last week, the world got handed a tiny flashlight and the chance to peek inside. These algorithms play a role in polarization, rocketing ordinary people to overnight fame, and the spread of extreme, violence-provoking content. Designed by tech companies to capture attention and drive engagement, they determine which posts end up in your feeds and which sink like a rock, never to be seen again. For the past decade or so, the social internet has been largely controlled by secretive algorithms.
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