Twitter’s Chief is giving out some major hints on how the company’s algorithm could be open-sourced as early as next week.
The tweet was published by Elon Musk yesterday and by the looks of it, it doesn’t appear to be a hoax, unless he’s really playing with people’s minds. But keeping in mind the past and how Musk has been a strong advocate for open-sourcing the company’s recommendation algorithm, this is more than just a rumor.
The Twitter owner has mentioned time and time again, even before taking over the social media company that he wanted it open-sourced as that’s the right way to go about the situation.
The news comes after the Tesla and SpaceX CEO gave out a response to a fellow user on the platform, urging him to open source it so others may benefit. His answer began with a slight twist where he asked people to gear up to be disappointed as it goes open source as early as next week.
Obviously, the change would be major and very new. However, he did admit that it would improve with time. And if does prove to be real, then it would be the first commitment of its kind that meets a specific deadline. Therefore, observers are keenly trying to see how it all goes about.
Twitter has been under so much pressure recently from critics and those arising from the open source community like Mastodon. The latter witnessed a surge in its number of users right after Musk opted to take over the company last year in October.
On the other hand, we’re seeing other archrivals like Tumblr announce how it also adopts a similar activity protocol, with Flickr speaking similarly.
Meanwhile, making the platform open source would also assist lawmakers as well as regulators while helping keep political interest at an all-time high. Everyone wants to know how the recommendations algorithm works in terms of Twitter’s content so they can attain their own benefits from it.
The news comes at a time when the American Supreme Court spoke in detail about how YouTube’s algorithm was recommending ISIS videos. Similarly, there is more scrutiny being done regarding TikTok and how it might be spying on leading media journalists and manipulating different trends going viral as we speak.
But by being more transparent and opening up the platform to the likes of adopting open sourcing, it might actually end up avoiding scrutiny of this kind. We might even see Elon Musk shift away focus from how he raised questions after forcing engineers to make his posts appear at the top of the app’s feed.
Before we forget, Musk is not doing something totally new here. We have seen other CEOs from Twitter in the past make similar suggestions but they were yet to go forward with the decision. Hence if Musk does end up doing this, it’s definitely going to be looked upon as a major ordeal.
For instance, we had the likes of Jack Dorsey proceed forward with the decision to have Twitter open-sourced. However, he faced plenty of hurdles along the way. And now, the latest on this front has to do with him putting that same vision into the company Bluesky. This is an open-source endeavor that has come out of the Twitter firm. The latter is in the works to create ADX which is another name given to decentralizing protocols in social networking.
We’ll need to keep our eyes and ears open for Musk’s next tweet on this front and until then, it’s time to wait and watch.
Read next: Twitter’s New Policy Will Remove 2FA For Users That Don’t Pay But You Can Still Get It Without Giving Musk Your Money
The tweet was published by Elon Musk yesterday and by the looks of it, it doesn’t appear to be a hoax, unless he’s really playing with people’s minds. But keeping in mind the past and how Musk has been a strong advocate for open-sourcing the company’s recommendation algorithm, this is more than just a rumor.
The Twitter owner has mentioned time and time again, even before taking over the social media company that he wanted it open-sourced as that’s the right way to go about the situation.
The news comes after the Tesla and SpaceX CEO gave out a response to a fellow user on the platform, urging him to open source it so others may benefit. His answer began with a slight twist where he asked people to gear up to be disappointed as it goes open source as early as next week.
Obviously, the change would be major and very new. However, he did admit that it would improve with time. And if does prove to be real, then it would be the first commitment of its kind that meets a specific deadline. Therefore, observers are keenly trying to see how it all goes about.
Twitter has been under so much pressure recently from critics and those arising from the open source community like Mastodon. The latter witnessed a surge in its number of users right after Musk opted to take over the company last year in October.
On the other hand, we’re seeing other archrivals like Tumblr announce how it also adopts a similar activity protocol, with Flickr speaking similarly.
Meanwhile, making the platform open source would also assist lawmakers as well as regulators while helping keep political interest at an all-time high. Everyone wants to know how the recommendations algorithm works in terms of Twitter’s content so they can attain their own benefits from it.
The news comes at a time when the American Supreme Court spoke in detail about how YouTube’s algorithm was recommending ISIS videos. Similarly, there is more scrutiny being done regarding TikTok and how it might be spying on leading media journalists and manipulating different trends going viral as we speak.
But by being more transparent and opening up the platform to the likes of adopting open sourcing, it might actually end up avoiding scrutiny of this kind. We might even see Elon Musk shift away focus from how he raised questions after forcing engineers to make his posts appear at the top of the app’s feed.
Before we forget, Musk is not doing something totally new here. We have seen other CEOs from Twitter in the past make similar suggestions but they were yet to go forward with the decision. Hence if Musk does end up doing this, it’s definitely going to be looked upon as a major ordeal.
For instance, we had the likes of Jack Dorsey proceed forward with the decision to have Twitter open-sourced. However, he faced plenty of hurdles along the way. And now, the latest on this front has to do with him putting that same vision into the company Bluesky. This is an open-source endeavor that has come out of the Twitter firm. The latter is in the works to create ADX which is another name given to decentralizing protocols in social networking.
We’ll need to keep our eyes and ears open for Musk’s next tweet on this front and until then, it’s time to wait and watch.
Read next: Twitter’s New Policy Will Remove 2FA For Users That Don’t Pay But You Can Still Get It Without Giving Musk Your Money
