Twitter makes some of its source code publicly available

As promised repeatedly by Twitter's CEO Elon Musk, Twitter has opened up a portion of its source code to public inspection, including the algorithm that it uses to recommend tweets on a user's timeline, including the algorithm used to determine which tweets are most relevant to them.

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Two repositories have been published by Twitter on GitHub that contain code for a large part of what makes Twitter tick, including the mechanism through which users can set what tweets they want to see on For You, Twitter's timeline for new tweets. In a blog post published by Twitter on Wednesday, the company described the move as "the first step towards becoming more transparent" and at the same time "preventing risk" to Twitter itself and its users.

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Musk clarified the following in a Twitter Spaces session today:

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"The initial release of the so-called algorithm is going to be a bit embarrassing, and there will be a lot of mistakes that people will come across, but we will be able to fix them in a matter of days ... and regardless of whether you agree with everything, you will know why it is there, and you will be able to understand that you won't be manipulated in a secret way," he explained. "It is through the analogy of Linux as an open-source operating system that we are aspiring. In theory, one can find a lot of exploits for Linux if one allows himself to look for them. It is actually the community that is responsible for identifying and fixing the exploits that are being exploited."

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Regarding the second point in the blog post made about preventing risks, it’s important to note that the open-source releases do not include the code that powers Twitter’s ad recommendations or the data used to train Twitter’s recommendation algorithm. The release notes also do not provide many instructions on how to inspect or use the code, which reinforces the notion that the release notes are strictly oriented toward developers.

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The company added that "we excluded any code that may compromise user safety and privacy, or affect our platform's ability to protect against bad actors, such as undermining our efforts to prevent child sexual exploitation and manipulation," Twitter wrote. "As part of our efforts to make sure the safety and privacy of our users are protected, we (also) took the following steps."

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Twitter said it is working on tools that will help it manage code suggestions from the community and sync the changes to its internal repository as soon as they are made. At the moment, there is no sign of either of these being available, so it seems probable that they will appear at some point in the future.