Elon Musk’s X Is Making A Major Change, Shedding Light On ‘Shadow Bans’

Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, is opening up its source code to users, allowing them to see whether the platform has shadow-banned them or may do so in the future, based on its rules and scoring systems.

Elon Musk’s social media platform is expanding its open-source code for its “For You” timeline on GitHub, a site for developers. It will also open-source its ranking and filtering methods, according to TechCrunch.

“The goal is straightforward – we want people to be able to answer for themselves whether a platform is limiting their reach, whether the system is fair, and why they see particular content,” the X announcement read.

https://t.co/soxNY8YdP7

Releasing this code will help users understand how their posts are displayed and whether other users see them. Users will also be able to see how X’s rankings may have affected past content and posts. (RELATED: Most Americans Think Social Media Is Turning Kids Into Addicts, Poll Suggests)

“You can see the systems that filter out potentially problematic, rule-violating content,” Keith Coleman, X’s vice president, told TechCrunch. “And some of those systems, like the ranker and the score, you can even run yourself outside the company.”

The open-source code will also allow developers to give X recommendations or “pull requests” to X, which the company can decide whether to implement.

“I mean, how cool would it be for the X algorithm to be not just visible to the public, but also, like, by the public?” Coleman said.

X is also releasing a new transparency tool, “Under the Hood,” which allows users who have made at least 10 posts to see what labels have been applied to their content and why certain content may have been suppressed, according to Crypto Briefing.

X is one of the first major social media platforms to open-source its “For You” code, but it will not release the entire code, leading some to question whether X is actually practicing transparency or if this is just for show, according to Crypto Briefing.

One piece of code not released to the public is the system Grok uses to predict whether a post violates a rule. This system was not released to the public because it could allow users to bypass the code and spam X.