Elon Musk Says Twitter Will Open Source its Algorithm Next Week

Elon Musk is teasing that Twitter could make its algorithm open source next week. Open sourcing Twitter’s algorithm was one of Musk’s ideas for Twitter before he acquired the company back in October, though the Twitter CEO said that we should keep our expectations in check.

“Prepare to be disappointed at first when our algorithm is made open source next week, but it will improve rapidly,” Musk said yesterday in a response to a tweet asking him to open source the algorithm. To my knowledge, it’s the first time that Musk gives an ETA for making Twitter’s algorithm open source.

Prepare to be disappointed at first when our algorithm is made open source next week, but it will improve rapidly!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 21, 2023

In a TED interview back in April, Elon Musk explained that making Twitter’s algorithm would improve trust in the platform. “One of the things that I believe Twitter should do is open source the algorithm, and make any changes to people’s tweets, if they are emphasized or de-emphasized, that action should be made apparent so anyone can see that that action has been taken. So there’s no sort of behind-the-scenes manipulation, either algorithmically or manually,” Musk said at the time.

However, since Musk acquired Twitter last year, trust in the platform has undoubtedly decreased: Twitter has not only banned third-party clients and restricted access to its API, but the company also introduced other changes that made the platform worse.

Recently, Twitter tried to force users to see the algorithmic “For You” feed every time they opened the app, though the company later backtracked. Last week, after a report claimed that Elon Musk had become obsessed about the declining engagement on his tweets, many Twitter users complained that they were seeing an unusual amount of tweets from Elon Musk in their feeds. However, the Twitter CEO said that this was just a bug.

Twitter finally open sourcing its algorithm could be a rare glimpse of hope for Twitter power users desperate about Musk ruining a platform that still doesn’t have a true alternative. Mastodon, the decentralized social network that many saw as a better and more open version of Twitter continues to bleed users. We’ll see what happens next week, though Musk probably didn’t need to say that Twitter users should be “prepared to be disappointed.” It’s hard not to feel that way since Musk acquired the company.