Sentiments of worry, panic, and uncertainty echoed across the internet just a few hours after news of the Elon Musk Twitter buyout was announced early this week. The $44 billion acquisition was accompanied by a press release where the Tesla and SpaceX founder made public his plans for the microblogging and social networking site. Among those is making the algorithms of Twitter open source. Thinking about other successful open source SaaS platforms, the plan seems promising yet was met with immediate backlash by critics.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” stated Musk. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spambots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
The algorithms that are most controversial on Twitter and that Musk is concerned with are the recommendation algorithms. These are the codes promoting or downranking tweets on user accounts that some have suggested might potentially be biased. If open source Twitter becomes a reality, these algorithms will be on Github and available to the public to check, comment on, and improve as with any open-source platform around.
Twitter can benefit from the transparency that open source brings. There is more visibility into the code base and trust increases since discussions about how features, developments, and bugs are addressed are also available to the community.
One notable example of an open-source platform that has a thriving community is WordPress. The hugely popular content management software is the platform of choice for 43% of all sites across the web and very well credits its success to its global contributor groups. It’s licensed under GPLv2, which allows users to use WordPress in any way they choose—install, modify, and distribute.
Another successful open-source software is OpenStack. It’s a cloud computing platform mostly deployed as an infrastructure-as-a-service (iSaaS) and is the third most active open source project in the world. OpenStack does everything in the open, from the design and development process to the management of releases and peer-reviewed tools. The community supports integrating and vetting new ideas, which contribute to OpenStack’s strong portfolio of services.
In both WordPress and OpenStack, transparency and community help make the design and vetting processes stronger. Continued innovation is crucial for any product to evolve and be a better version of itself. Looking at it from this perspective, Twitter could really grow and realize its full potential backed by a strong open source community.
However, it’s still necessary to tread carefully. There are no details yet on what open source license to follow if Twitter were to go down that path. The concerns about Twitter becoming open source are legitimate. Open-source software does pose risks including security, intellectual property violations, vulnerabilities, and poor developer practices. Making Twitter’s algorithms available to the public can also open it to bad actors who will explore the software to find vulnerabilities they can exploit.
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