Elon Musk reportedly plans to “make the algorithm open source to increase trust”. Twitter has been known for having a trust problem. Conservatives worry that they are being censored, while progressives worry that twitter has become a vehicle for disinformation and abuse. Twitter’s most avid users routinely turn to their followers for advice about everything from good restaurants in a new city to how to cope with personal crises. Some twitter users trust their followers, but not the platform. Because every user sees a different timeline, it’s difficult to know just how open, more transparent Twitter – or any tech platform – isn’t as simple as publishing some code on GitHub (Musk’s proposed destination for Twitter’s source code). 

So-called “machine learning” algorithms behind a lot of AI are complicated rules for making statistical inferences. In the case of Twitter, the algorithms look for patterns about what types of tweets have induced people to stick around by liking, retweeting, or otherwise engaging with post, and then aim to show users more of the sorts of things that have interested in them in the past. But the algorithm itself is only part of the story – access to the data on which an algorithm is trained is also crucial to understanding the behavior of the system “Its only after machine learning models have been trained on the data that you can actually see what are the most important features and how the models actually work,” said Jeff Allen, a co-founder of Integrity Institute, a nonprofit network of tech integrity professionals. 

Free speech town square: Musk’s feistiest priority – but also the one with the vaguest roadmap – is to make Twitter a politically neutral” digital town square for the world’s discourse that allows as much free speech as each country’s laws allow. 

Defeating the spam bots: “Spam bots” that mimic real people have been a personal nuisance to Musk, whose popularity on Twitter has inspired countless impersonator accounts that use his image and name – often to promote cryptocurrency scams that look as if they’re coming from the Tesla CEO. 

Authenticate all humans: Ramping up mundane identity checks – such as two-factor authentication or popups that ask which of six photos shows a school bus – could discourage anyone from trying to amass an army of bogus accounts. Musk might also be considering offering more people a “blue check” – the verification checkmark sported on notable Twitter accounts – like Musk’s – to show they’re who they say they are. Musk has suggested users could buy the checkmarks as part of a premium service.