Slashdot: Twitter Opens Much of Its Source Code To the Global Community

Twitter Opens Much of Its Source Code To the Global Community
Published on April 01, 2023 at 12:35AM
Twitter blog: At Twitter 2.0, we believe that we have a responsibility, as the town square of the internet, to make our platform transparent. So today we are taking the first step in a new era of transparency and opening much of our source code to the global community. On GitHub, you'll find two new repositories (main repo, ml repo) containing the source code for many parts of Twitter, including our recommendations algorithm, which controls the Tweets you see on the For You timeline. We're also sharing more information on our recommendation algorithm in this post on our Engineering Blog. For this release, we aimed for the highest possible degree of transparency, while excluding any code that would compromise user safety and privacy or the ability to protect our platform from bad actors, including undermining our efforts at combating child sexual exploitation and manipulation. Today's release also does not include the code that powers our ad recommendations. We also took additional steps to ensure that user safety and privacy would be protected, including our decision not to release training data or model weights associated with the Twitter algorithm at this point. Ultimately, this is our first step to be more transparent in this way, and we plan to continue sharing more code that does not present a significant risk to Twitter or people on our platform.

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