- Twitter’s Recommendation Algorithm Source Code Released to Public today.
March 31, 2023: In a major move, Elon Musk has just made the source code for Twitter’s recommendation algorithm publicly available on Github. This is a significant step for the company, as it aims to provide full transparency to its users about how its systems work. In this article, we‘ll take a closer look at this breaking news and what it means for the future of the platform.
Twitter Algorithm’s Goal: Bringing the Best of the World to its Users
Twitter’s goal has always been to bring the best of what’s happening in the world to its users. To do this, it employs a recommendation algorithm to narrow down the approximately 500 million tweets posted daily to just a few top tweets that eventually appear on the user’s For You timeline.
Components of the Recommendation System
The recommendation system is composed of various interconnected services and jobs that work together to deliver the best tweets to the user. The foundation of Twitter’s recommendations is a set of core models and features that extract latent information from tweet, user, and engagement data.
These models are designed to answer important questions about the Twitter network, such as, “What is the probability you will interact with another user in the future?” or, “What are the communities on Twitter and what are the trending tweets within them?” The recommendation pipeline is made up of three main stages that consume these features: candidate sourcing, ranking, and heuristics and filters.
The service responsible for constructing and serving the For You timeline is called Home Mixer. This service acts as the software backbone that connects different candidate sources, scoring functions, heuristics, and filters. Home Mixer is built on Product Mixer, Twitter’s custom Scala framework that facilitates building feeds of content.
Full Transparency for Twitter’s Users
The goal of the company’s open source endeavor is to provide full transparency to its users about how its systems work. With the release of the source code for the recommendation algorithm, users can now view the code in detail and understand how the algorithm works. In addition, Twitter is working on several new features to provide its users with greater transparency within the app. Some of these new developments include:
- A better Twitter analytics platform for creators with more information on reach and engagement
- Greater transparency into any safety labels applied to tweets or accounts
- Greater visibility into why tweets appear on the timeline
Conclusion
Twitter’s decision to release the source code for its recommendation algorithm is a major step forward for the company and its users. With full transparency about how its systems work, users can now have a deeper understanding of how tweets are selected for their For You timeline. The company is working on several new features to provide even greater transparency, making Twitter a more user-friendly platform for everyone.
