And personally I never used Twitter much, but I certainly did not follow Elon Musk when I did - yet I had to see lot's of his posts in my feed. Surely just coincidence.
"They were just tracking how well his tweets were doing versus others. "
Yeah, and adjusting it, so he comes out best. That was Musks demand, as the other article shows, that is linked inside, after a Biden tweet performed better than Musk:
They officially boost people, who pay a little bit. Elon payed a lot.
And the source is clearly not the production source and never where in this shape - otherwise why sue someone, who open sourced it?
"But, the release of this source code also comes days after Twitter forced Github to take down other parts of Twitter's source code that was allegedly posted by a former employee without the company's permission. So, clearly, there's still plenty of Twitter that Musk still doesn't want us to see."
Also, you probably missed that:
"Zoë Schiffer of Platformer reported that Twitter actually removed part of the source code that affected the reach of Musk's and other user's tweets before releasing the algorithm to the public."
Which is consistent with quite some other statements, also from Twitter itself and the fact, that the source has not been updated in 8 months.
"But the underlying policies and models are almost entirely missing (there are a couple valuable components in [1]). Without those, we can't evaluate the behavior and possible effects of "the algorithm.""
It's not too hard to believe it is a coincidence when the most followed person on a platform shows up in your feed, especially if you follow tech accounts.
So changes in power users stats would also result in audience balancing?
Most likely the code was used for analytics and for tracking balance; Elon was a pain in the ass and asked to have custom analytics for his account and devs eventually added him as an audience to be able to get analytics about him easily. A bit dirty but it works.
Most likely the balancing code is somewhere else and it affects only republican / democrats.
