This article was published on November 27, 2013

Twitter appears to be experimenting with predicting viral tweets


Twitter appears to be experimenting with predicting viral tweets

It looks like Twitter is experimenting if they are able to predict which tweets are going to go viral with a new account that’s extremely similar to previous experiments @magicrecs and @eventparrot.

A mysterious new account (@magicstats) has appeared with a bio that reads as follows:

I favorite the best tweets I see in real-time

Despite the account being protected, we’ve gained some insight into how it works over the last few days. When a user tweets something that the service thinks will go viral, it favorites the tweet within a few minutes of it being sent. In both instances where @magicstats favorited our tweets, they received well over 100 retweets within a few hours.

magicstats

We’re not 100% sure this is an official account yet, but the design and wording of the account similar to that of the previous experiments. The functionality that’s being tested here could be a response to Favstar’s service, which allows you to track how far a tweet travels and helps show just how popular a tweet is becoming before it goes viral.

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Twitter declined to comment on the experiment when contacted, but an earlier blog post detailing the company’s policy on experiments remains in effect.

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