Security News > 2023 > March > Twitter open-sources recommendation algorithm code

Twitter announced on Friday that it's open-sourcing the code behind the recommendation algorithm the platform uses to select the contents of the users' For You timeline.

"Today's release also does not include the code that powers our ad recommendations. We also took additional steps to ensure that user safety and privacy would be protected, including our decision not to release training data or model weights associated with the Twitter algorithm at this point."

Twitter has published two separate GitHub repositories containing the source code for its recommendation algorithm and some of the machine learning models powering it.

Twitter is also attempting to use a subpoena filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to force GitHub to share identifying information on the FreeSpeechEnthusiasm user who first published the files and anyone who accessed and distributed the leaked Twitter source code, which could likely also be used for further legal action.

Today's announcement follows tweets made by Twitter CEO Elon Musk promising to make the Twitter algorithm public, the first one a poll asking users to vote on a poll to decide if "Twitter algorithm should be open source" and the second saying that "Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31st.".

Twitter takes down source code leaked online, hunts for downloaders.

News URL

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/twitter-open-sources-recommendation-algorithm-code/