Twitter publishes ‘a large part’ of its source code on GitHub

Twitter on Friday made “a large portion” of its source code publicly available on GitHub. The public code includes Twitter’s recommendation algorithm for the For You timeline. The code for the ad recommendations is missing.

Twitter writes in a blog post that it has published two repositories on GitHub. The main repo and ml repo contain the source code for ‘many parts of Twitter’. This includes, for example, the recommendation algorithm for Twitter’s For You page, which the company also discussed on Friday a technical blog post published. Recommended tweets for users appear on that timeline, which are not necessarily published by accounts the user follows.

That algorithm works by retrieving ‘the best tweets from different recommendation sources’, Twitter reports. These are then ranked using a machine learning model. Finally, heuristics and filters are applied so that, for example, tweets from blocked users or with NSFW content do not appear in the For You page if desired. The exact code of the algorithm can now be found on GitHub.

Twitter has not published all the code behind the platform. The company says it has excluded certain components to protect the privacy and security of users. For example, no details have been shared about how the platform combats child abuse and manipulation. The code behind the ad recommendation algorithm has also not been published. Twitter also says it is not currently releasing training data or model weights related to the Twitter algorithm. Owner Elon Musk reports on Twitter ‘the rest [van de broncode] follows’. It is not known exactly when those parts will be made public.

Musk promised last year that Twitter’s source code would be made public after he completed the takeover of the platform. He did after he conducted a poll on Twitter, in which he asked users if he should make the platform’s source code public. About 83 percent of respondents answered “yes.” Musk said in late February that the code would appear within a week, but later postponed that to the end of March. The CEO says Twitter will resolve any issues if they are discovered.

The structure of the algorithm behind a Twitter timeline. Source: Twitter