Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Twitter has released the code that chooses which tweets show up on your timeline to GitHub and has put out a blog post explaining the decision. It breaks down what the algorithm looks at when determining which tweets to feature in the For You timeline and how it ranks and filters them.
According to Twitter’s blog post, “the recommendation pipeline is made up of three main stages.” First, it gathers “the best Tweets from different recommendation sources,” then it ranks those tweets with “a machine learning model.” It then filters out tweets from people you’ve blocked, tweets you’ve already seen, or tweets that are not safe for work.
The post also goes in-depth to each step of the process. For example, it notes that the first step looks…
