X opens up its source code: this is how we can find out whether our account is being penalized

Elon Musk’s social network, X, has decided to make a large part of its source code public, and now we can understand much better how the feed system works. As reported by TechCrunch, X has published on GitHub the code for its “For You” feed and also that of its ranking engine. Now we can find out why we see some posts before others, but we can go much further, because we can find out whether our account is shadowbanned.

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We can see how X classifies our posts

The repository, under an Apache v2 license, includes the models, the filters, and the parameters. By comparison, we’re looking at a codebase between 10 and 15 times larger than the previous one, which gives us much more information about how X works. But how can we find out whether our account has some kind of restriction?

Easy. In the “Under the Hood” section, within the settings, it lets us download a JSON file. That file will show the labels applied to our account or to our posts over the last month. 

For now this system is rolling out gradually and requires an account that is at least a year old and has made 10 posts in the last month. If we have access, or as availability increases, we’ll be able to feed the JSON to a language model to see what’s going on, pointing it to X’s public repository on GitHub so it knows how to interpret the information.

While the debate over the use of our data on X goes on, we now have more information to audit the algorithm and see how it really affects our account. Clearly, that’s good news and a very important change for the conversation about the platform.