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Will Norris who works on OSS at Twitter posted this[0]: "watch this space https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm " [0]: https://twitter.com/willnorris/status/1518694675909013504
Oh hey - I didn't know he'd left Google. He was a big part of open source there too.
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What does "unperson" mean?
It’s lazy shorthand for “belatedly apply their policies against hate speech to prominent politicians”.
By the way, in the USA there is no legal support for the term hate speech. It is covered under the umbrella of the first amendment.
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In that case, the definition of “the algorithm” is the training set.
> the definition of “the algorithm” is the training set Or the trained model itself. There are people looking for intentional bias. But the insidiousness of the problem likely arises from unintentional bias. Letting researchers brute force the ranking models with hypotheticals could be a win win.
I've worked on very large scale recommendation systems at a FAANG. If Twitter's system resembles anything like ours, the concept of publishing or open sourcing "the algorithm" doesn't make sense. Even if we were to open source all associated code and publish all related documents it would be very difficult to make sense of the entire system. That is precisely why companies such as Twitter A/B test the hell out of eve…
As someone who’s also worked in this area, I disagree with this take. There is typically clear objective function of a recommendation system. What Twitter is optimizing for is what’s of interest here. And some of the hidden business rules. It’s likely these are specified in the code in an obvious way. How exactly they achieve that is the part that is complex and relatively indecipherable. It’s possible that it’s desi…
My point is that the devil is in the details and implementation. These details are likely something that no one person understands and no one person is able to fix. The concept of being able to extract "the algorithm", factor it out from the codebase and share it with the public doesn't make sense to me. It won't be possible to fully understand how Twitter serves recommendations and ranks posts without understanding how all the different services at Twitter interact. Are they planning on open sourcing all of Twitter? Highly doubtful.
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Seems like a perfect troll/joke, especially given everything.
Trolling your new boss is a sure way to get your ass fired. EDIT: in case you're not aware, Musk has stated that one of the first things he'll be doing after taking Twitter private is to open source its algorithm.
I've worked on very large scale recommendation systems at a FAANG. If Twitter's system resembles anything like ours, the concept of publishing or open sourcing "the algorithm" doesn't make sense. Even if we were to open source all associated code and publish all related documents it would be very difficult to make sense of the entire system. That is precisely why companies such as Twitter A/B test the hell out of eve…
Understood and several of us have dealt with large complex systems. Open sourcing algorithm or code is not about everyone go and analyze the same, instead when controversy or issues arise it'll be readily available for independent experts to review it.
There are elements of their algo that I think should be openly defined, and perhaps there should be some regulatory branch that reports to Congress that has full access. However, obfuscation is often necessary to countering bad actors.
On the other hand, wouldn't open sourcing the algorithm help accelerate the identification of possible exploits?
There is great opportunity to abuse this by Twitter, yes. There is also a lot of money to be made. But in defense of some of that being secret, is the fact that any publicly known ruleset (with no hidden exceptions) _will_ be exploited by bad actors. Imagine if search engines told spam sites exactly why their site dropped in page rankings.
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Has there ever been any actual indication of twitter shadow bans being a real thing, or are we putting it in the same "weird conspiracy theory" category as "facebook listens using microphone to target ads"? I follow a few people in "gamer/twitch twitter" and every now and then this meme pops up of twitter secretly deranking "go live" twitch.tv tweets, which is much more palatable to these people than the reality of j…
> Has there ever been any actual indication of twitter shadow bans being a real thing Please stop living in this bubble. There have been plenty of reports of Twitter shadow banning speech it doesn't like. It has even suspended accounts multiple times only to reinstate them by saying it was an "algorithm error" or it being "wrongly flagged". In India we regularly see Twitter suspending accounts that have not violated…
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"does not rely as much on lies to advocate its positions" To be honest, that's hilariously false. The left suppressed Hunter Biden's laptop story for two years, saying it was misinformation, before admitting it was true. The IRS targeted right-wing and Christian non-profit organizations deliberately for auditing. Obama claimed that forcing nuns to buy health insurance covering birth control was necessary, and claimed…
Please, do go on and on. You can stop when you get to the left attempting to overturn the American presidential election. Edit: are our neoliberal overlords a bunch of cold hearted shit heads? Yes. Should we elect and promote barely disguised fascists in response? No.