Twitter has released a piece of its source code. The company has uploaded part of its version to GitHub. recommendation algorithmthat is, for you, the system that decides which messages reach sections such as Search and Discover and also feeds a large part of the social network’s advertising platform.

News Posted by Elon Muskbefore buying the social network, Twitter was in favor of becoming an “open source social network”. This Friday after the announcement, businessman told He promised that “many embarrassing problems” would be discovered, but that they would be fixed quickly.

Part of Twitter code is now public

As we said, we are not dealing with the entire code of the social network, but only with a part of the recommendation algorithm (“most” according to Musk). As you can imagine, this moves Twitter away from the idea of ​​being an open source social network, but the company assures that they will release the rest of the code in the future.

While navigating GitHub folders, we come across codes that are difficult to understand, even for Twitter employees themselves. “Our ‘algorithm’ is very complex and not fully understood internally, Musk said in the middle of this month. But, an official blog post In some ways, it can act as a guide.

The Twitter team explained how the For You section works. As they explain, social networking models ask “How likely are you to interact with another user in the future?” or “What are the communities on Twitter and what are the trending Tweets in them?” make relevant recommendations.

From a technical point of view, the above is carried out in three main stages. Getting the best Tweets based on different referral sources, categorizing Tweets machine learning model and applying filters to eliminate blocked accounts, currently seen and unsafe Tweets.

Focusing on the first of the three phases, Twitter says it extracts the first 1,500 Tweets from its sources for each request. After the process is complete and goes through the machine learning model, the For You section presents 50% of the “in-network” messages from the user and 50% of the “out-of-network”, i.e. unfollowed accounts.

Both the blog post and the GitHub page now provide lots of other technical details that are publicly accessible. Regarding this move, the social network said that “provide full transparencyabout how their systems work. They also reveal that they are working on a few more to come later.

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