Why Isn’t #Wikileaks Trending, and Should We Care?
So the Wikileaks organization released the first batch of a promised quarter million US State Department cables today, and it seems like everyone on the planet is talking about it. The story is front-page news at media sites across the globe, it’s all over the television, and for a while this afternoon more than two percent of all Twitter traffic was about the leaks.
You read that right — one in every fifty tweets was about Wikileaks this afternoon. To put that in context, it’s about three times as many as mentioned Justin Bieber.
And yet “Wikileaks” hasn’t hit Twitter’s trending topics list all day. Right now #becauseofjustin, a Bieber-related hashtag, holds the top spot on Twitter’s global trending topics list, even though it’s running just one tenth the volume of #wikileaks itself.
Twitter being Twitter, there’s no shortage of speculation about why this is. Some suggest it’s a conspiracy of