I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. Ask me Anything!

I'm not entirely qualified to comment but can give some information from from what I've observed. 1. There isn't like a single "algorithm" somewhere making decisions. Elon Musk talked about open sourcing Twitter's algorithms after (if) the acquisition goes through and I think this will be really hard. The "algorithm" is a complex set of many pieces. Some of which are indeed more algorithm-like processes that can be written out. Some of them are extremely subtle and nuanced product decisions that impact how people use the product. Knowing just the algorithms I mentioned won't really help anyone with anything, because user behavior is impacted by all kinds of non-algorithmic product decisions. Even seeing the entire source code would not give a good look into this. 2. There are people who care at the companies. The way intellectual property treated in the United States, where most of these companies are based, mean that companies have to keep all information about their processes secret. I actually think people would love to talk more about how things work and I think that would be much more effective than trying to have outside experts examine these algorithms.