Elon Musk’s Stance On Twitter’s Open Source Is Quite Open

Twitter CEO Elon Musk is in the news again (as if he was ever out). Now it’s for a tweet he tweeted on Twitter saying the company is getting ready to open source its algorithm sometime next week. That is, if it isn’t a joke (you never know). Although it’s more likely he is serious about it, given the evidence that he has been in favor of such a move for a long while. In fact, he mentioned it even before he took over as well as when he announced his intention to takeover.

“Prepare to be disappointed at first when our algorithm is made open-source next week, but it will improve rapidly!” This was his announcement, which came as a reply to another tweet calling on him to make Twitter open source.

‘Open source’ usually consists of software or source code that can be used by anyone, allowing them to view, modify or redistribute it as part of their own program.

Elon Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist” who conducts polls on Twitter of important decisions. As someone who advocated that Twitter should be open source, he conducted a poll about the same in March 2022. Regarding the topic, he tweeted, "I'm worried about de facto bias in 'the Twitter algorithm' having a major effect on public discourse. How do we know what's really happening?"

In May of 2022, he tweeted again, "You are being manipulated by the algorithm in ways you don't realize. I'm not suggesting malice in the algorithm, but rather that it's trying to guess what you might want to read and, in doing so, inadvertently manipulate/amplify your viewpoints without you realizing this is happening."

Replying to it, Jack Dorsey, Co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, replied that the default feed presented tweets based on user interest and popularity and it was "designed simply to save you time when you are away from the app for a while." To this, Musk responded, "Open source is the way to go to solve both trust and efficacy."

According to reports, if he makes the algorithm open source, it will increase its transparency. According to Thomas Davidson, a Rutgers University sociology professor and expert on hate speech on social media, it will also empower researchers to counter extremist speech on the platform and learn how it spreads.


However, Elon Musk isn’t the first to bring open source to social networking platforms. Twitter’s competitor Mastodon implemented the open, decentralized social networking protocol, ActivityPub in 2017. Interestingly, according to reports, the platform saw a surge of users soon after Elon Musk took over Twitter.

Soon after, Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg said his company would be adopting the same technology. This was followed by Flickr CEO Don MacAskill planning to implement the same idea.

These announcements put Elon Musk and Twitter under a little pressure to follow suit.

Either way, Elon Musk isn’t the first Twitter bigwig to suggest open source was a better future path for Twitter. Former CEO and Co-founder Jack Dorsey had recently expressed regret that Twitter wasn’t developed as an open-source platform and instead as a company.

Reportedly, he shared these ideas with Elon Musk via text messages. The details emerged post-Musk’s litigation against Twitter before the takeover. Excerpts from the conversation read as, Twitter should be an “open-source protocol, funded by a foundation” and reply from Musk, “super-interesting idea.”


While the move to make the platform open source would make it easier to flag irregularities in its source code, Musk himself has allegedly been on the wrong side of what he has endorsed.

According to reports, he made a team of around 80 engineers to reconfigure the algorithm so that his tweets would be viewed by more people after he felt some of his tweets didn’t get as much engagement as other users did (read here). He later attributed that incident to a bug.

What do you think of Elon Musk’s plan to make Twitter open-source and do you think it will benefit against hate speech and make the platform better? Let us know in the comments below!