San Francisco, California - Social media platform Twitter publicly released large portions of its algorithm for selecting tweets for users' feeds on Saturday, which showed a questionable "Elon" category and users' political affiliations.

The company's billionaire owner, Elon Musk, said in an online question and answer session on Saturday night that he hopes to build trust through transparency by releasing the code behind the platform's "For You" recommendations.

"Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality," Musk tweeted.

Twitter users can view tweets either in chronological order or selected by the company's software. In the latter case, tweets from profiles that a user does not actually follow can be added to the feed.

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Experts looking over the algorithm quickly discovered that a separate category was provided for tweets from Musk himself. When asked about this during the question and answer session, Musk called it "strange" and claimed that he did not know about it.

A Twitter software developer said the "Elon" category was created only for statistical purposes and denied that Musk's tweets benefit from boosted reach on the platform.

The code also designates whether a user is a Democrat or Republican politician in the American party system, something the software developer said was to ensure that neither party benefits or is disadvantaged when changes are made to the software

Musk announced that the categories would be removed quickly.