Twitter source code may have 'embarrassing issues': Elon Musk
"No
doubt, many embarrassing issues will be discovered, but we will fix them
fast!" Elon Musk says
Elon Musk's Twitter has made public parts
of the source code that decides how the microblogging website recommends
content to its users.
The billionaire, who also owns Tesla and SpaceX, promised that more
of the code would be available in the coming days.
While the
source code was made public so third parties could review it, Musk noted
that people could also see some embarrassing issues in it.
"Most
of the recommendation algorithms will be made open source today. The rest
will follow," he said in a tweet.
"Acid test is that independent
third parties should be able to determine, with reasonable accuracy, what
will probably be shown to users."
"No doubt, many embarrassing issues will be discovered, but we
will fix them fast!" Musk added.
In a blog post, the company said
it had uploaded the source code to two repositories on GitHub. They include
the source code for many parts of Twitter, including the recommendations
algorithm which controls the tweets that users see on their timelines.
However, they do not include the code that powers Twitter's ad
recommendations.
Musk believes that code transparency would
result in higher trust among the users and could also lead to
improvements.
The move also comes after parts of Twitter's source code were
leaked on Github, which took down the code last week at Twitter's
request.
