Musk: Tweet recommendation algorithms to be revealed soon

Twitter owner Elon Musk seems to be keeping his promise to be more transparent about tweet recommendations soon. The algorithms used to select contributions for individual users will be announced on March 31.

The tech billionaire announced this on Saturday evening. As open source software, they can be analyzed by programmers. On Twitter, tweets can be displayed in chronological order, or weighted by software designed to find interesting and relevant posts for each user. Musk had long ago promised that Twitter would reveal the mechanisms behind this selection.

With the announcement, Musk now tempered expectations of the software. It is too complex and not fully understood even by those responsible for the online service. “People will discover a lot of stupid things,” he wrote on Twitter. The transparency will be “incredibly embarrassing” at first, but should quickly lead to better recommendations.

Last month, a US report that Twitter had temporarily increased the reach of Musk’s tweets in the “For you” section prompted regulators in Germany to take action. The Bavarian State Center for New Media (BLM) started the investigation for a supervision procedure. Musk denied that there was any deliberate increase in the reach of his posts. It was just a software bug that gave the replies the same weight as tweets. Users noticed a strikingly high number of reply tweets from Musk among featured posts. (aeg/sda/dpa)