Twitter will use AI to detect, highlight manipulation of public opinion: Elon Musk

“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 …” Musk tweeted.

The announcement comes at a time when Twitter has been under immense scrutiny over the lack of content moderation on the platform since the billionaire took over in October last year.

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Twitter has since executed several rounds of layoffs and is reportedly running on a skeleton staff, leaving it vulnerable to outages as well as disinformation and harmful content.

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Advertisers too have deserted Twitter, prompting Musk to look for other ways to monetise such as subscription-based services.

Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that European Union has directed Musk to hire more human moderators and fact-checkers to review posts on Twitter.

Twitter has been leaning heavily on automation to moderate content, doing away with certain manual reviews. It does not employ fact checkers, unlike larger rival Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook and Instagram, the report said.

Meanwhile, Musk also announced that he will make public the long-secret algorithm for recommending tweets.

Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31st, Musk said in a tweet.

“People will discover many silly things, but we’ll patch issues as soon as they’re found!” Musk said, adding “Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality.”

Musk said that the recommendation algorithm used at Twitter is overly complicated and not fully understood inside the company.