Twitter owner Elon Musk apparently wants to keep his promise to provide more transparency in tweet recommendations soon. The algorithms according to which the contributions for individual users are selected are to be disclosed on March 31, as the tech billionaire announced on Saturday night. As open source software, they will be able to be analyzed by programmers.

On Twitter, tweets can either be displayed in chronological order – or weighted by software that should select interesting and relevant posts for each user.

Musk had promised some time ago that Twitter would disclose the mechanisms behind this selection.

At the announcement, Musk now dampened expectations for the software. It is too complex and is not fully understood even by those responsible for the online service. "People will discover a lot of stupid things," he wrote on Twitter. The transparency will initially be "incredibly embarrassing", but should quickly lead to better recommendations.

Supervisory procedures in Germany?

Last month, a US report that Twitter had temporarily increased the reach of Musk's tweets in the "For you" area called supervisors in Germany on the scene. The Bayerische Landeszentrale für neue Medien (BLM) initiated the examination for a supervisory procedure. Musk denied that there had been a targeted increase in reach for his posts.

It was merely a software error that equated replies with tweets in terms of weighting. Users had noticed a conspicuously high number of Musk's reply tweets among the recommended posts.