🐦 Twitter Algorithm For Humans Part 1: Authority

Twitter released its algorithm. It means we can now browse the source code and learn why a lot of things happen on that platform, especially why it does not promote good content.

I am a software engineer with 16 years of experience so I will explain to you what we can learn from the algorithm. I will also try to demistify some rumors that are spread online.

The code is written in Scala and it requires technical background to understand it correctly. But since I’m here, you don’t have to have it.

Today I will take a look at authority. Authority is a rank that describes how important a Twitter account is. Twitter calls this metric a page rank. It is confusing name derived from the name Google used to rank websites.

As we can read on release notes:

Tweepcred is a social network analysis tool that calculates the influence of Twitter users based on their interactions with other users. The tool uses the PageRank algorithm to rank users based on their influence.

This tool has multiple files, especially a Reputation and UserMass files containing algorithms to calculate authority.

These ranks most likely are used in other places as a factor included to decide how many people can see tweets from a given person. I will…