Twitter posts the code it claims determines which tweets people see, and why

Enlarge / Twitter has posted what it states is the code used by its algorithm to recommend tweets to its users.

Twitter has made good on one of CEO Elon Musk’s many promises, posting on a Friday afternoon what it claims is the code for its tweet recommendation algorithm on GitHub.

The code, posted under a GNU Affero General Public License v3.0, contains numerous insights as to what factors make a tweet more or less likely to show up in users’ timelines.

In a blog post accompanying the code release, Twitter’s engineering team (under no particular byline) notes that the system for determining which “top Tweets that ultimately show up on your device’s For You timeline” is “composed of many interconnected services and jobs.” Each time a Twitter home screen is refreshed, Twitter pulls “the best 1,500 Tweets from a pool of hundreds of millions,” the post states.