Elon Musk’s plan to open source the twitter algorithm won’t solve anything

Releasing some Twitter code would provide greater transparency, said Damon McCoy, associate professor and co-founder of Cybersecurity for Democracy, who studies security and privacy of large, complex systems including social networks, but even those who built Twitter may not fully understand how it works.

A concern for Twitter’s engineering team is that, amid all this complexity, some code may be taken out of context and highlighted as a sign of bias. Revealing too much about how Twitter’s recommendation system operates might also result in security problems. It may also be possible to exploit machine learning algorithms in ways that might be subtle and hard to detect. “Bad actors right now are probing the system and testing,” said McCoy, adding that access to Twitter’s models “may well help outsiders understand some of the principles used to elevate some content over others.”