Elon Musk said Twitter users were manipulated by the site's timeline algorithm, prompting a response from founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey.
This represents the latest development in Musk's turbulent acquisition of the company. In a new tweet, Musk indicated the need to replace the platform's default timeline, which displays tweets based on popularity and user interests.
"You are being manipulated by the algorithm in ways you don't even realize," Musk said. He asked his followers to fix the timeline to show the latest tweets by clicking on the star in the top right of the screen.
- Dorsey responded by disagreeing with Musk, saying the job was a way to keep followers informed of trending news and could easily be changed.
- And Dorsey tweeted: It's designed to save you time when you've been away from the app for a while. Pulling to refresh returns you to the reverse chronology as well.
- Dorsey then responded to a tweet from another user who said the functionality was designed to be tampered with, but could have consequences.
- No, Dorsey said, they weren't designed to be tampered with. Designed to help you and showcase what you care about. This could have unintended consequences. Dorsey argued that the current option of choice was preferable.
Musk responded to himself several hours later, stating that the manipulation was not intentional by Twitter. "I'm not suggesting there is malicious intent in the algorithm," he said, "but it's trying to guess what you might want to read." As a result, they manipulate or inflate your views without even realizing that this is happening.
Added: Not to mention potential errors in the code. Open source is the way to go to resolve both trust and efficacy.
Twitter's algorithm has been a major talking point for Musk, who wants it to be open source to increase trust in the platform, as he said the acquisition is pending confirmation that only 5% of the site's accounts belong to the bot category.
Twitter founder responds to Musk
Musk suspects the number is higher, and said he's taking a sample of 100 random Twitter followers. When a user asked him to explain the bot filtering process, he replied: I chose 100 as the number for the sample size, because that number is what Twitter uses to calculate the 5% of fake, spam, and duplicate accounts.
Musk said he has not yet seen any analysis showing that the social media company has fake accounts less than 5%, and there is a possibility that the number of fake accounts is more than 90% of daily active users.
The CEO of electric car maker Tesla explained that Twitter's legal team accused him of violating the non-disclosure agreement by revealing that the sample size for the social media platform's checks on automated users was 100.