How Twitter Stopped Wikileaks From Trending, and Why
On Wednesday Twitter finally released an official statement on the controversy over Wikileaks’ failure to appear on trending topics lists in the last few weeks. They answer the question of whether they’ve blocked Wikileaks from the lists with an “absolutely not,” then go on to provide an overview of what trending is and how it works.
What they have to say will be familiar to those who followed my back-and-forth with company representative Josh Elman on my blog last week, but here are the bullet points:
- “Twitter Trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that attempts to identify topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously.”
- “Put another way, Twitter favors novelty over popularity.”
- “Sometimes a topic doesn’t break into the Trends list because its popularity isn’t as widespread as
