I have been trying to avoid the whole Elon Musk / Twitter drama, but it has been challenging. I am ambivalent about whether Mr. Musk’s takeover of Twitter is a good or bad thing. My vibe is 🤷🏾♂️.
But, I do have an issue with one of Mr. Musk’s ideas: open-sourcing the Twitter algorithm to ensure there is no “bias.”
I think this is disingenuous, and Mr. Musk is playing to his (adoring) audience a little bit.
It is improbable that there is the “one true algorithm” at Twitter. They probably use a combination of machine learning-based recommendation models with other systems such as entity and intent detection. Take a look at Twitter’s engineering blog to see how much ML drives recommendations on the social network.
So, if the intention is to look at the code and delete any (left-wing | right-wing) bias, things will be.. difficult.
Now, a discussion should be had about how the ML models are trained and if there are any biases in the labeled datasets that are used to drive recommendations, detect abusive content, etc. This is a complex problem, however!
An important effect of the pervasive deployment of ML technologies is that it makes computing *probabilistic* instead of *deterministic*. i.e., we know what is likely to happen, but it is difficult to predict what *will* happen.
This paradigm shift makes it very difficult to point the finger at one or more woke/radical/reactionary programmer who decides to censor or advocate for free speech.
Mr. Musk knows all this, of course. The entire Tesla “full self-driving” stack is built on ML. So, perhaps, a little bit of intellectual honesty might lead to a more interesting discourse about bias.
Links:
Why Elon Musk Wants to Open Source Twitter
Elon Musk’s Poll on whether the Twitter “algorithm” should be open-sourced: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507041396242407424
Twitter Engineering Blog: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us
MIT Technology Review has a good writeup about this: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/27/1051472/the-problems-with-elon-musks-plan-to-open-source-the-twitter-algorithm/