The agreement to buy Twitter by Elon Musk was filled with opinions, promises and suggestions for improvement from the mogul and very little certainty.
Among a number of ideas that you commented on, if its acquisition is completed and therefore the transition of the social network into a private company is an unusual event in the history of the Internet on a platform with the scale and influence of Twitter. – emphasizes that “liberate” and open source your algorithm.
“People can read this and say, ‘Oh, I see a problem here, I don’t agree with this,’” Musk said, explaining his idea in a conversation with the founder of the famous TED Talks, his first major interview since the deal. “They can identify issues and suggest changes, just like you update Linux or Signal.”
Similar open source offerings already exist. Mastodon, the Twitter-like social network that some of its users switched to after buying Musk, already exists. In the case of Twitter this week, we saw how – it is not known how kind troll— inside one of his employees, a folder was uploaded to GitHub that claimed to contain the algorithm.
But, What will be the consequences of issuing recommendations and mechanisms for the operation of the platform? The “Twitter Algorithm”, which, as we will see in a moment, is a very simplistic approach, is the reason why some tweets go viral outside of community retweets. That we get tweet recommendations from people we don’t follow, or how our timeline is organized if we have it in the default version that Twitter has played with in recent years, alternating it with the chronological version and now letting you choose between two.
You can’t talk about one “Twitter algorithm”
First of all, we must remember that Musk’s proposal is based on the fact that everyone can see the algorithm and correct the possible errors that it may contain. But this is the first condition. Not everyone can read code, and more complex code, although without a doubt it would be a transparency mechanism.
What doesn’t seem so obvious is that it’s as easy to do as uploading a repository to GitHub. At least for now.
Early versions of social media platforms were used to log users’ posts and comments in reverse chronological order, with the most recent appearing first in users’ feeds and timelines. That all changed in 2009, when Facebook began populating news feeds with content that the algorithm determined would be most interesting to individual users. Other platforms have followed suit and started testing their own versions, citing user experience as a motivation, just like Twitter.
This change is believed to have spurred the growth of the platforms and made them far more profitable, as ads are easier to sell to interested readers than to bored scrollers.
As with other social networks, It is not known how Twitter is modeled, what visibility it gives depending on what messages or what factorswhich is a problem that is attributed to all networks because they think that in some cases they may prioritize controversial or incendiary messages, creating more interaction, or conversely, limiting other conversations according to some principles that are not public.
Musk positioned himself from the beginning to give almost absolute freedom of speech in the pursuit of freedom of speech, although he later changed the nuances and put the law as a barrier.
But the first problem is that there is no single algorithm that determines how Twitter decides to raise or not display content, as opposed to the simple version that Musk seems to offer, who, on the other hand, is certainly aware of this complexity.
Except, Twitter is known to use machine learning (machine learning) to guide many decisions. For example, Twitter trains numerous learning models to help decide which posts to prioritize in users’ feeds based on a dizzying number of factors. These models cannot be validated like normal code; they should be tested in an environment as close to the real world as possible.
“You can’t open a machine learning model like it’s a bubble,” said Steve Teixeira, VP of Product at Twitter, who denied the biggest.
And the transparency of the algorithm is not everything.
There are also experts who do not agree that open source is a panacea in this case and can lead to a number of important problems. For example, it could give people with bad interests a better understanding of how to beat the system and could encourage the spread of bots on the platform, which is another of Musk’s crusades. “When something is made open and available to everyone, it can be abused”commented Arun Kumar, director of data and marketing technology at an advertising company Interpublic group of companies Cos a bloomberg.
Except, public algorithm does not prevent manual penalties which, in this case, could be given very vertically from the Mask figure. The use of this type of action is already carried out by Google, for example, when a portal is positioned in its search, but shows content that is considered illegal or inappropriate, but managed to outwit to the algorithm.
There are also questions about how this could hurt Twitter commercially. Recommendation algorithms are proprietary and are the main intellectual property of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and TikTok. Who will need to invest in paying for more reach on a network where the elements that drive that reach are known? While the latter, investing in advertising doesn’t seem to be one of Musk’s biggest concerns, he said he prefers to push the Twitter Blue subscription model and other sources of income.
Bluesky, Dorsey’s proposal, which is also related
So: Is there a solution? Twitter may choose to release its most basic algorithm, or at the user or account level, so that the platform’s limiting and enhancing factors can be accurately known.
Besides that Musk will revive an old ambition of his friend and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: Project Bluesky.. A model that, with a simple explanation, would work as a kind of marketplace for algorithms that developers could download and add, and users could choose depending on what type of Twitter they wanted to have. Perhaps very simple, with little to no algorithmic intervention, for others where opening or vetoing certain topics is the basis in a much more refined and open way than the current topic recommendations that the platform follows.
Actually Bluesky was a project meant to be distributed to all social platforms as we explained in hypertext here some time ago.
Source: Hiper Textual
