Algorithms for tweet recommendations to be disclosed soon
Twitter owner Elon Musk apparently wants to make good on his promise to ensure greater transparency in tweet recommendations soon. The algorithms used to select posts for individual users are to be disclosed at the end of March.
This was announced by the tech billionaire on Saturday night. As open source software, they can be analyzed by programmers. On Twitter, tweets can either be displayed in chronological order - or weighted by software that is supposed to pick out interesting and relevant posts for each user. Musk promised some time ago that Twitter would disclose the mechanisms behind this selection.
At the announcement, Musk dampened expectations for the software. He said it was too complex and that even those responsible for the online service could not fully understand it. "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 U.S. report that Twitter had temporarily increased the reach of Musk's tweets in the "For You" section had put supervisors in Germany on notice. The Bavarian Regulatory Authority for Commercial Broadcasting (BLM) initiated an investigation for a supervisory procedure.
Musk denied that there had been a targeted increase in reach for his posts. It was merely a software error that put replies on an equal footing with tweets in terms of weighting. Users had noticed a conspicuously high number of Musk's reply tweets among the recommended posts. (SDA)
