Jan 11, Kathmandu - Social media platform X has hinted that it will soon provide more transparency about how its content recommendation algorithm works.

Elon Musk, the platform's owner, announced in a post on X on Saturday that the new X algorithm will be made open source within the next seven days.

According to Musk, all the code used to recommend organic and ad content to users will be made public.

“The new X algorithm, which includes all the code used to recommend organic and ad posts to users, will be made open source within 7 days,” he said in the post.

He also said that the algorithm will be released with updates every 4 weeks and detailed developer notes will be provided on what has changed. X's recommendation algorithm has recently been the focus of investigations by France and the European Commission.

The European Commission has extended the data protection order it sent to X at the beginning of last year until 2026.

Demands for oversight and accountability of the platform are growing, particularly after the revelation that X’s chatbot, Grok, was used to produce child sexual abuse material (CSAM) at the request of users and to create content that digitally nudes women without their consent.

Elon Musk has repeatedly pledged to open up the algorithm since he acquired Twitter (now X). In 2023, he released the code for the ‘For You’ feed to GitHub. However, the code published at the time was criticized for not covering important aspects of the algorithm. In addition, the code was not updated on time.

Musk has claimed that the process will be regular, along with the announcement of the new algorithm. “It will be repeated every 4 weeks, with detailed developer notes, so you can understand what has changed,” he said.

While X has presented the move to open up the algorithm as an effort to increase transparency, regulators and users are expected to be wary of how much real accountability it will ensure.