Twitter first introduced trending in summer 2008. Twitter Trends are algorithmically created and they measure events that are being talked about right now. More explicitly, Trends favour velocity and originality over popularity.
The topic has been the source of anger among some people who have insisted that the company is censoring its "trending topics", possibly under pressure from the US government.
This is what is written on Twitter’s blog: "This week, people are wondering about WikiLeaks, with some asking if Twitter has blocked #wikileaks, #cablegate or other related topics from appearing in the list of top Trends.
"The answer: Absolutely not. In fact, some of these terms, including #wikileaks and #cablegate, have previously trended either worldwide or in specific locations."
The company explains:
“The Trends list is designed to help people discover the 'most breaking' breaking news from across the world, in real-time. The Trends list captures the hottest emerging topics, not just what's most popular.
So what makes a trend a Trend? "Topics break into the Trends list when the volume of Tweets about that topic at a given moment dramatically increases. Sometimes a topic doesn't break into the Trends list because its popularity isn't as widespread as people believe. And, sometimes, popular terms don't make the Trends list because the velocity of conversation isn't increasing quickly enough, relative to the baseline level of conversation happening on an average day; this is what happened with #wikileaks this week."
Source: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/12/to-trend-or-not-to-trend.html
According to people who track such things, on the morning of December 6, about 1 per cent of all tweets reportedly mentioned WikiLeaks, a much higher volume than any topic that did make the top 10, and still it didn't show up.
However, an article on BuzzFeed.com, http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrismenning/is-twitter-censoring-wikileaks, offers an answer.
Rumour has it, it is all Justin Bieber's fault. Twitter used to rank topic popularity by volume, but changed its methodology recently when the pop singer's fan base of teen girls continued to account for almost 3 per cent of tweets. The new algorithm is based on "interesting peaks", sudden increases that mark a new trend. On November 28, WikiLeaks did spike enough to show on the Trends list, but because the volume of tweets held relatively steady after that it simply wore out its welcome.
"It's not that Twitter is 'censoring' WikiLeaks," BuzzFeed concludes. "WikiLeaks has simply succumbed to the Bieber effect, becoming a part of the constant background noise just like love, hate and Christmas." Some users have suggested overcoming the "Bieber effect" by using a new hashtag on WikiLeaks tweets, #BradAss87. Although it has gained a bit of Twitter traction, at last look it still wasn't trending.
I have had so many conversations with people and there are so many questions, so much confusion and so many opinions regarding what is going on.
Are Twitter in fact blocking WikiLeaks from trending? Twitter have argued against this allegation.
So what is happening?
I have been told, and it makes some sense, that Twitter ignores hashtag trends that are also a registered username. Since wikileaks, iamwikileaks and cablegate have all been usernames, this may be the logic behind why they aren’t appearing.
If people talk about some subject for the whole week, at some point, it will not be considered a trend. I really think that this is an issue (or maybe not) with the trending algorithm.
Long story short: #Wikileaks is no longer rising in interest; it is, in fact, a much commented topic, but it is not rising.
Many, still don’t believe Twitter!
“Obviously, there has been some kind of manipulation going on.
The state department has been very active in advance; putting high pressure on the media. No doubt, they called Twitter and begged for some downscaling …”
Hmmm! This is a toughy!
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