Since the dawn of the Trends feature in 2008, there have been a lot of discussions about what makes a trending topic and what doesn’t. From the days of Justin Bieber fans filling the topics list to the promoted Trends, the question has come up often.
Most recently, with the debacle of Wikileaks, Twitter has come under fire as suspicions have risen that the company is censoring the #wikileaks hash tag. Though Twitter employees have vehemently denied it, the public has still been curious. To set the record straight, we now have an entry from the Twitter blog:
The answer: Absolutely not. In fact, some of these terms, including #wikileaks and #cablegate, have previously trended either worldwide or in specific locations.
The post goes on to then explain that a trend is measured more about what’s hot right now than what’s hot over a period of time. The idea is to discover the “most breaking” of breaking news. With more than 95 million tweets per day, it is often times easy to forget that only a small segment of people might be following a certain topic. Add to that the fact that you’re likely to follow people on Twitter who have similar interests and the facade that something is amiss can easily come into play.
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