Elon Musk keeps his promise as Twitter officially makes some of its source code public

Twitter has announced that it will make parts of its recommendation algorithm code public, with the entirety of the code set to be available on the code-sharing platform GitHub in the coming weeks. The move follows a request from Twitter's owner, Elon Musk, who believes that code transparency will lead to greater user trust and more rapid improvements to the product. 

"In the coming weeks, we will open source literally everything that contributes to showing a tweet," Musk said in a tweet on Saturday.

The decision also responds to concerns from users and lawmakers, who are increasingly scrutinising social media platforms over how algorithms select the content that users see. The release of the code will allow users and programmers to suggest modifications to the algorithm, and Twitter has said that it will update the algorithm based on user suggestions every 24 to 48 hours.

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Twitter has uploaded the code in two repositories on GitHub, including the source code for many parts of the social media site, such as the recommendations algorithm, which controls the tweets that users see on their timeline. However, the code that powers Twitter's ad recommendations is not included, and the company has also excluded code that would compromise user safety or privacy, as well as details that could undermine efforts to prevent child sexual abuse material on the platform.

The release of the code follows a recent leak of parts of Twitter's source code on GitHub, which the company requested be taken down. In response to the recent leak of parts of Twitter's source code on GitHub, the social media platform requested that the US District Court for the Northern District of California mandate GitHub to provide "all identifying information" linked to the account responsible for posting the leaked code.

Last Friday, Elon Musk and several Twitter employees hosted a Spaces session, Twitter's audio chat feature, to provide users with the opportunity to share feedback and ask questions regarding the platform's code. During the session, a user raised concerns about Twitter's code seemingly categorizing users as either Republicans or Democrats. In response, a Twitter employee explained that this was an outdated feature and not relevant to the platform's recommendation system. They also stated that the company was currently in the process of removing it.

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