Musk’s Plan to Reveal the Twitter Algorithm Won’t Solve Anything
When Elon Musk victory-tweeted his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter on Monday evening, he committed to improving the social network by, among other things, “making the algorithms open source to increase trust.”
In a TED talk earlier this month, the entrepreneur suggested that the algorithm that determines how tweets are promoted and demoted could be uploaded to the software hosting platform GitHub, making it available to people outside of the company. “People can look through it and say, ‘Oh, I see a problem here, I don’t agree with this,’” Musk said. “They can highlight issues and suggest changes, in the same way that you update Linux or Signal.”
In reality, cracking Twitter open to see how it truly works would involve a lot more than just uploading some code to GitHub. And proving the existence—or absence—of biases that may be subtle in nature and depend on a multitude of ever-changing factors may prove to be far more difficult than Musk suggests. On the face of it, greater transparency makes a lot of sense. Social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok wield enormous influence and power but are largely opaque to their users and regulators. And just as the source code for a computer program provides a way to inspect it for bugs or backdoors, revealing the code that makes Twitter tick might, in theory, show that the platform promotes certain types of content over others.
