In a blog post, the company announced “a new era of transparency for Twitter.” According to Elon Musk’s plan, this will make the social network similar to Linux, where development will be carried out by involving external developers to improve algorithms and eliminate bugs – everyone will be able to submit their own edits to the code.

What was learned from the code?

Enthusiasts have already started to study the code and found a lot of interesting things there. It is worth noting that the published code is only a small part of the entire Twitter code. Only affects how Tweets appear in the For You feedhowever, it does not affect the code behind the search algorithm or how content is viewed elsewhere on Twitter.

• A recommendation neural network reportedly scans hundreds of millions of tweets for multiple parameters. select around 1,500 messages best suited to the interests of each particular user. They are ranked by the probability of interaction between the user and the author of the tweet – the higher the probability, the more their tweet will appear.
• These tweets then go through an additional filter and end up in the “For You” suggestions section. Half of the tweets posted in this section come from the authors the user follows, and the other half comes from the authors that the user does not know.
• Tweets from people you don’t know are selected based on the likes of your followers and tweets similar to yours.

Interest:

• The Twitter algorithm specifically specifies whether a tweet was written by Elon Musk. This may provide another explanation for why Musk’s tweets appear so frequently.
• The algorithm has flags that indicate whether the tweeter is an “influential user” and whether he is a Republican or Democrat.

When asked about this aspect of the algorithm in the Twitter space, Musk replied: “I agree that it shouldn’t. It definitely shouldn’t separate people into Republicans and Democrats, it just doesn’t make sense.”. Later, a Twitter engineer determined that the categories were only “Tracking statistics have nothing to do with the algorithm”. These shortcuts “to make sure we’re fair to one group versus the other.” At the same time, the developer hasn’t explained why Musk has his own category, and the company’s president says it’s “weird” and this is the first time he’s heard of it. Twitter Space ended less than a minute after this question.

The second image of this tweet shows the categories “author_is_elon”, “author_is_power_user”, “author_is_democrat” and “author_is_republican”

• Other factors to consider when rating a tweet include whether it was written more than 30 minutes ago, contains a photo, and was written by an “experienced user”, which some believe to mean an old verified account.

Ukraine in Twitter code

An interesting point can be found regarding Ukraine. The war there is called the “Ukrainian crisis” and is placed in the same block of unacceptable topics as violent, poisonous, fraudulent and hateful content.

In code text does not explicitly state that this topic is prohibited. But since the “Ukrainian crisis” is full of violence and hatred under the same “Space Safety Label” sign that forced the social network to reduce certain content in its feed, it’s safe to say that the war in Ukraine is equated with just that. contents.

“Ilon’s Twitter interferes with Ukrainian tweets. Long suspected, finally confirmed”

Ukrainian users noticed a long time ago that their tweets began to appear less frequently than before. Thanks to the newly added view statistics button, tweet views can be easily seen.

• The only geopolitical issue on the banned list is Ukraine.
• At the same time, Elon Musk is the only user of the social network with individual promotion privileges.
• It is not clear from the code whether the company is simply reducing the output of war-related tweets, or the content of all Ukrainians on any given topic in general.