'Facebook whistleblower' pointed out a clear path to Musk: Twitter algorithm must be open source

After experiencing a series of farce, Musk finally successfully spent 44 billion US dollars and became the new boss of Twitter, but Twitter seems to be getting closer and closer to the "open source commitment" he once made. the further away.

Recently, Frances Haugen, who has disclosed Facebook insider information, published in an interview with NBC News about "Musk believes that social media affects political activities "the opinion of.

She said that the most critical thing Musk can do now 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.

He would get more help by open-sourcing the algorithm—it would cost him little to gain more.

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

Facebook is an example. Haugen believes that if Facebook’s mechanism was truly transparent and if there really was accountability, then Facebook would not be a company with profit margins of For a 35% company, its profit margin will only be 15%.

Haugen was a product manager on Facebook’s civic integrity team. He left Facebook in May 2021 and took away and disclosed tens of thousands of pages of Facebook’s internal documents.

Issues revealed in the documents include Facebook's clear knowledge that its product Instagram was exacerbating the damage to the mental health of teenagers; inciting ethnic violence in countries such as Ethiopia; and failing to curb misinformation before the riots in Washington, D.C. wait.

Haugen was also known as the "Facebook Whistleblower."

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

In a subsequent multi-part investigation, The Wall Street Journal went on to report that Facebook viewed pre-teens as an untapped market; set up secret system to allow 580 Millions of users, including politicians and celebrities, were able to bypass content rules and more.

"Open source" is just talk?

Musk made an important promise in his TED interview last April: Open source Twitter’s algorithm!

I think one of the things Twitter should do is open source the algorithm. If a user’s tweet is modified, everyone should be able to see it. In other words, there is no certain kind of behind-the-scenes operations, whether algorithmic or manual.

Musk also expressed his hope that Twitter could become "the most accurate source of information in the world." However, in the weeks after the acquisition was completed, the new boss not only laid off a large number of technical staff, but also Reduced the number of people primarily responsible for handling content moderation.

Interestingly, Musk once said that he is an absolute free speech person, and once launched a poll "Do you think Twitter has free speech?" ” and promised to unleash Twitter’s potential by “promoting free speech” and “banning spam bots.”

But after taking over Twitter, Musk directly laid off those Twitter employees who had publicly opposed him.

Shortly after spending $44 billion, Musk explained in a memo that he acquired Twitter to promote dialogue, but that he believed the dialogue had failed.

Having said that, another consequence of the massive layoffs is that Twitter cannot continue its open source projects.

Like other modern software companies, Twitter also 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 also developed on open source code. .

Will Norris, former head of open source projects at Twitter, said in an interview with foreign media: "When I first joined Twitter, we were already one of the largest users of Apache Kafka, Hadoop and Scala. We also had a Java A custom fork of the virtual machine JVM that may eventually become open source."

#But after Musk took over, most of the key people working on open source at Twitter left, All the engineers Norris had worked with in the open source world have left.

Long term, Norris believes Twitter has become irrelevant in the open source community. Open source communities are built on relationships and trust, and now that Twitter has no relationship with these development teams, they have lost any ability to meaningfully participate in these communities.

In addition, technical staff who left months or even years ago still have access to Twitter’s open source repository on GitHub, and this problem has not yet been resolved.

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

So, from a realistic perspective, all of these projects may need to be forked and moved to a new place, but that would be a messy process, and there may be Very destructive.

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