"Am I actually being shadowbanned" is a question creators have been asking for years. This time, X isn't offering a promise — it's offering a file.
X has expanded the open-source code powering its default "For You" timeline by 10 to 15 times, releasing it under an Apache v2 license. The release covers model configurations, filtering mechanisms, and the core ranking system — essentially the logic that determines which signals get weighed, and ultimately, whose posts show up on whose feed. It's the largest algorithm disclosure X has made to date.
More directly useful is the new "Under the Hood" setting. Any account that's posted 10 or more times in a given month can download a JSON file from the app's settings, listing whether the account or individual posts were tagged with any visibility restrictions over the past month. For creators who aren't coders, the practical move is straightforward: feed the JSON into a large language model, cross-reference it against the code published on GitHub, and reconstruct exactly how your content was handled by the recommendation engine.
Keith Coleman, X's VP of Product, said what's being released is "the actual logic used to retrieve and rank posts for any timeline." External researchers have already used the code to train and run the Phoenix scoring system locally, and X says it welcomes pull requests from developers to help improve the algorithm. But not everything is being made public — the system relying on Grok to predict policy violations was deliberately left out, to prevent bad actors from reverse-engineering the moderation system to game it.
For now, this transparency tool is only available for testing to existing accounts that are over a year old, with wider rollout to follow. At the same time, X is resuming publication of monthly active user data following the completion of its corporate integration with SpaceX.
