@adamwarski@softwaremill.social

The "[X] Algorithm" is open-source;

I see this being thrown around a lot, and it's start to annoy me more than it should (not by the way it's done on this article, but how some people use this as a proof of X's transparency).

I had some doubts about calling it open source when it was released, and now that there are no commits in a whole year, I find it even more dubious.

My main concern being with a lot of the features being blackboxes. Taking this to a ridicule, it would be like claiming that def getScore(tweet: Tweet): Future[Double] = callRecommender(tweet).zip(callToxicityDetector(tweet)).map(_ * _) is an open source recommender.

For example:

• There are some US politics features. They seem to be unused in the source code (maybe the algorithm is adjusted near election time?), and it's not obvious how the labeling required for those features is done.

• On the topic of US politics, there also seems to be some code that handles those annotations in a closed source timeline mixer

• There are also a lot of references to an HML model (which I also believe to be closed source) to handle toxicity.

  This is all from a quick skim at the code. To me, it kind of feels that this repo is enough to be called open source and claim transparency, while at the same time:

• It cannot be reproduced/tested locally (too many closed-source parts)

• It's too big to be auditable without a huge investment

• It doesn't stop anyone from "adjusting the knobs" as they see fit.

  Just to be clear, I'm not claiming that anyone is using this in a malicious way. My complaint is specifically about the "Open Source" part. I feel like "partly open-source" wouldn't be as misleading.