Twitter has released portions of its software for public viewing. The short message service provided the source code for the timeline recommendation algorithm on developer platform Github on Friday. There it can be examined. In addition, external programmers can look for bugs or suggest improvements. On the company’s blog, the US group described the process as a “first step towards a new era of transparency”.
In another post, the processes behind the recommendation engine are also explained. “The goal of our open source efforts is to provide you, our users, with full transparency into how our systems work.”
Twitter, on the other hand, would have withheld code that could compromise users’ security or privacy. Furthermore, the parts of the program responsible for advertising recommendations are not disclosed. Also, Github doesn’t contain the data that would be used to train the algorithms. The group, led by Tesla boss Elon Musk, asked for cooperation on the Twitter code. “We look forward to capitalizing on the collective intelligence and knowledge of the global community to help us find issues and suggest improvements that will ultimately lead to a better Twitter.”
Open source is a software development philosophy in which the source code of programs is made publicly available. Among other things, this should increase confidence in the software and make it easier to find bugs. The best-known representative of this approach is the Linux operating system, which also forms the basis of Google’s Android mobile operating system. Professionals and amateur programmers from all over the world work together on the code. Microsoft, for example, is taking a closed-source approach with Windows. The source code is kept strictly locked and accessible only to the company’s own developers. Microsoft acquired Github for $7.5 billion in 2018. (apa, dpa)