I'm not talking about whether it's accountable or not, I'm saying that to actually share the algorithm you're basically saying that you're going to open source Twitter's entire code base. Oh and when you do that the average person will be no better off because they don't read code anyway. And when engineers read through the code it's going to like "Where did you get all these different variable values from?" and the answer isn't "We came up with a method for valuing tweets from first principles", it's going to be "We showed 7 billion people tweet X and 7 billion people tweet Y and tweet X caused 5% more people to engage so we tweaked this value".
And sure, you can say "Well that's a bad way of designing the algorithm" but then what you're really saying is that you don't want to open source the algorithm at all, you want to re-write the algorithm to satisfy your sense of how the world should work with no evidence it'll actually work.
> , it's going to be "We showed 7 billion people tweet X and 7 billion people tweet Y and tweet X caused 5% more people to engage so we tweaked this value".
There is an entire new subfield of ML that is tackling this problem. There are now conferences dedicated to this topic. It is not an easy problem, but it is not impossible.
There are hundreds of researchers working on fairness, interpretability, trust and explainability in ML and a lot of them are working on models much much bigger than what Twitter's feed might involve.
> And sure, you can say "Well that's a bad way of designing the algorithm" but then what you're really saying is that you don't want to open source the algorithm at all, you want to re-write the algorithm to satisfy your sense of how the world should work with no evidence it'll actually work.
You can still open source multiple steaming piles of shit and then let the community improve that so that it is more widely understandable and trusted. See [1] again.
And sure, you can say "Well that's a bad way of designing the algorithm" but then what you're really saying is that you don't want to open source the algorithm at all, you want to re-write the algorithm to satisfy your sense of how the world should work with no evidence it'll actually work.