Even before the takeover of Twitter, Elon Musk announced that the disclosure of part of the social networking site’s code would be a move that would allow the public to check the principle of the platform’s algorithm. In mid-March, the billionaire promised that selected fragments would be made available as open source (on an open source basis). On March 31, Musk kept his word, and parts of the source code, which is responsible for the algorithm that selects the content to be displayed in the “For you” section, went online. This is the first place we see after logging in, and Twitter is supposed to select them in such a way that they are the most interesting for us.
Twitter is to limit the visibility of tweets about Ukraine
The code appeared in two parts on the popular GitHub repository among developers and is available to anyone interested. Some Internet users quickly started combing it and unexpectedly found a mention of content related to Ukraine, specifically the “Ukrainian crisis”.
As explained by Aakash Gupta, who worked, among others, in Epic Games and Google, and with other programmers checked the code of Twitter, the platform cuts off the reach of posts that it treats as possible disinformation. Such tweets then do not go to the top of the featured list, but they have the lowest possible priority and thus end up at the bottom. Strangely, topics related to the war in Ukraine are supposed to be treated by the algorithm similarly to disinformation and also have a much lower priority than the others. The typical user therefore sees them less often.
Such behavior would explain the reports that appeared on the web some time ago. Some Internet users noticed that tweets about the situation in Ukraine seem to be less visible. However, it is not clear when a given piece of code was written. Perhaps this happened before Elon Musk took over the social platform. It is also not known whether it was added to limit the display of any information about the war, or was it to be some way to fight Russian propaganda bots.
Elon Musk’s attitude to the Russian-Ukrainian war is difficult to define. Initially, the billionaire helped Ukraine (he sent Starlink satellite internet systems), but then he wanted to cut off the defending country from the internet from space. Musk, however, also made absurd proposals to end the conflict. with Russia. Just a few days later
Source: Gazeta
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