The problems with Elon Musk’s plan to open-source the Twitter algorithm

Melanie Dawes, chief executive of Ofcom, which regulates social media in the UK, has said that social media platforms will have to explain how their code works. The Digital Services Act was passed by the European Union on April 23. Democratic senators in the US introduced a bill in February of 2022. Their goal is to bring new transparency and oversight of the algorithms that govern our timelines and news feeds.

It is theoretically possible for someone to copy and release a rebranded version of the source code of the social network. OpenSSL, a security toolkit used by large parts of the web, was the subject of a major security breach in the summer of 2014, when large parts of the internet ran on open-source software.

There are examples of open-sourced social networks. Mastodon, a platform that was set up after concerns about the dominant position of Twitter, allows users to inspect its code, which is posted on the software repository GitHub.

It doesn't give the average person much insight into the business structures and processes that go into its creation, and seeing the code behind an algorithm doesn't necessarily tell you how it works.

Jonathan Gray is a senior lecturer in critical infrastructure studies at King's College London.

Some of them will determine what people see on their timelines in terms of trends, or content, or suggested follows. The training data won't be very useful if you want to control what content appears in users timelines.

Most of the time when people talk about accountability, they don't necessarily mean what they say they want to see, but information about how they were developed. Concerns that artificial intelligence can perpetuate human biases in data used to train them are part of that. What data they use can make a difference to the results they spit out.

The risks outweigh the benefits for Cobbe. The computer code doesn't give us a lot of information about how the system was trained, tested, or prioritized, so open-sourced it may not make a difference to transparency. It could introduce some security risks.

Impact assessments are published by companies to highlight weaknesses and flaws in their data protection systems. When they are discovered, they get fixed, but data is often redacted to prevent security risks. The entire code base of the website would be open to all, potentially allowing bad actors to find vulnerabilities to exploit.

Eerke Boiten, a professor of cybersecurity at De Montfort University, doesn't believe that Musk is looking at open-sourced infrastructure and security at the moment.