Twitter chief Elon Musk on Saturday announced that the microblogging website would use artificial intelligence to “detect and highlight manipulation of public opinion” on its platform in the coming months.
“In the months ahead, we will use AI to detect & highlight manipulation of public opinion on this platform. Let’s see what the psy ops cat drags in …,” he wrote in a tweet.
Earlier, Musk was accused of boosting the reach of his tweets ‘above normal level’ by tweaking Twitter’s algorithm to garner more impressions. The Twitter CEO rejected the claims.
In prior updates, he announced that Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31. He went on to claim that the platform's algorithm is “not fully understood” by people working in the company because it is “overly complicated”.
“Our “algorithm” is overly complex & not fully understood internally. People will discover many silly things, but we’ll patch issues as soon as they’re found! We’re developing a simplified approach to serve more compelling tweets, but it’s still a work in progress. That’ll also be open source,” he tweeted.
Open-sourcing codes makes them easily accessible to the public who can then modify and redistribute those codes. It decentralises the ecosystem relying on cooperation and peer review.
“We’re developing a simplified approach to serve more compelling tweets, but it’s still a work in progress. That’ll also be open source. Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality. Most importantly, we hope to earn your trust,” Musk added.
Notably the move to tackle the “manipulation of public opinion” comes as the BBC reported its investigation as revealing that hundreds of accounts that were recently allowed back on the platform have been spreading abuse or misinformation.
A recent BBC report also quoted current and former employees as saying that Twitter is in no position now to protect users from trolling, state-driven disinformation campaigns, and even child sexual exploitation.
The report mentioned them as saying that tools required for such monitoring were proving difficult to maintain with massive layoffs that have hit content safety, moderation, and policy teams hard.
Hate is thriving under Musk’s leadership, “with trolls emboldened, harassment intensifying and a spike in accounts following misogynistic and abusive profiles,” the BBC report stated.
According to the BBC, content pertaining to child sexual exploitation is increasing on Twitter and is not being sufficiently raised with law enforcement agencies as it used to be earlier.
Currently, Twitter is said to have less than 2,000 employees, from more than 7,500 just a few months ago.