Open-sourcing Twitter's algorithms is more complex than Musk implies

“These concerns have been rampant with Google and Facebook. This open-sourcing move could be game-changing for social media overall.”

Skeptics, however, have questioned the plan’s feasibility. They note that Twitter is comprised of various feeds, from the Trending section to your Home timeline, each of which is controlled by a complex mix of recommendation systems and human decisions.

Another issue is that algorithms alone offer limited insights.

There are various other factors behind a tweet’s ranking. They include content that enters the platform, each user’s profile, the algorithms’ training data, moderation rules, and the code that trained the models.

These constitute an enormous pool of data, which would be tough to trawl through and costly to disseminate.

Further complexities arise from the mutability of the system.

“Typically, recommender models get re-trained pretty often and will keep changing over time,” Bindu Reddy, CEO and co-founder of Abacus.AI , an artificial intelligence startup, told TNW.

“While it is possible to release all trained models as well on an ongoing basis, it won’t be very useful either unless you understand exactly what inputs and outputs go into the model for predictions.”