Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Does Musk remember to open source Twitter algorithm?

After a series of farce, Musk finally managed to spend $44 billion to become the new boss of Twitter, but Twitter seems to be getting further and further away from the "open source promise" he made.

Recently, Frances Haugen, who has disclosed the inside story of Facebook, expressed his views on "how Musk thinks social media affects politics" in an interview with NBC News.

The most critical thing Musk can do right now, she says, is to disclose Twitter's algorithm to prove that he really wants to build a Public Square.

Open source it. He'd have more help-it'd be cheaper for him. It'd be more profitable.

Open source algorithms, he will get more help-for him to do so at a low cost, but can gain more.

Haugen also said social media companies were generally opposed to government intervention because it could lead to a drop in profit margins of at least 20 per cent.

Facebook is an example. Haugen believes that if Facebook is really transparent, and if there is accountability, then Facebook will not be a 35 per cent profit margin company, its profit margin will only be 15 per cent.

Haugen, a former product manager of Facebook's Citizen Integrity (civic integrity) team, left Facebook in May 2021 to take away and release tens of thousands of pages of Facebook internal documents.

The problems revealed in the documents include Facebook's clear knowledge that its product, Instagram, is aggravating the mental health of teenagers; inciting ethnic violence in countries such as Ethiopia; and failing to contain misinformation before the riots in Washington, D.C.

As a result, Haugen is also known as the "Facebook whistler".

She even predicted that the social media giant would not recover unless Zuckerberg stepped down as chief executive.

In subsequent surveys, the Wall Street Journal (The Wall Street Journal) continued to report on Facebook's view of pre-teens as an untapped market and secret systems that allow 5.8 million users, including politicians and celebrities, to bypass content rules.

Is "open source" just a word? Musk made an important promise in an interview with TED last April: the open source Twitter algorithm!

I think one of the things Twitter should do is open source algorithms, and if you modify a user's tweets, then everyone should be able to see, that is, there is no behind-the-scenes operation, whether algorithmic or manual.

Musk also said he hoped Twitter would be "the most accurate source of information in the world", but in the weeks after the acquisition, the new boss not only fired a large number of technicians, but also reduced the number of people mainly responsible for content censorship.

Interestingly, Musk once said he was an absolute free speaker and once launched a vote, "do you think Twitter has freedom of speech?" And promised to unleash the potential of Twitter by "promoting freedom of expression" and "blocking spam robots".

But after joining Twitter, Musk directly laid off Twitter employees who had openly opposed him.

Shortly after spending $44 billion, Musk explained in a memo that the acquisition of Twitter was to promote dialogue, but he thought the dialogue had failed.

That said, another consequence of massive layoffs is that Twitter cannot continue with open source projects.

Like other modern software companies, Twitter relies heavily on open source programs. For example, the website itself runs on the free and open source CentOS 7 system, and related applications are developed on open source code.

Will Norris, former head of Twitter's open source project, said in an interview with foreign media: "when I first joined Twitter, we were already one of the biggest users of Apache Kafka, Hadoop and Scala. We also have a custom branch of the Java virtual machine JVM, which may eventually open source. "

But after Musk took over, most of the key people who worked on open source on Twitter left, and all the engineers that Norris had worked with in the open source field left.

In the long run, Norris believes that Twitter has become irrelevant in the open source community. The open source community is based on relationships and trust, and now Twitter has nothing to do with these development teams, and they have lost any ability to participate meaningfully in these communities.

In addition, technicians who left a few months or even years ago still have access to Twitter's open source repository on GitHub, an issue that has not yet been resolved.

As for Twitter's own open source projects (such as Finagle), Norris does not expect Twitter to do anything to continue to maintain these projects, at least not to the previous level.

So, from a practical point of view, all of these projects may need to fork and move to a new place, but this will be a chaotic process and can be very destructive.

Reference:

Https://www.businessinsider.com/frances-haugen-elon-musk-should-open-source-twitter-algorithm-2023-1

Https://zdnet.com/article/twitter-turns-its-back-on-open-source-development/

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Xin Zhiyuan (ID:AI_era), editor: LRS

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