I’ve addressed this before, in connection to the Wikileaks trending topics controversy (and previously in connection to #demo2010), but it’s always been tucked away as part of a longer post, so it’s been easy to miss. And it keeps coming up, so here goes:
Twitter has no policy against allowing usernames to trend on its Trending Topics list. Twitter usernames trend all the time.
Right now, as I write this, seven of Twitter’s global trending topics — dbsk, BEPE, Varanaski, alliwant, lemmeguess,Suyono, and Cassiopeia — are single words. Each of those seven words are also usernames. Some are long-established (@cassiopeia has tweeted more than 3400 times and has nearly 400 followers) and some are brand new (@lemmeguess has never tweeted and is following only four people), but all of them exist.
And if you think about it, this makes sense. If Twitter had a “no usernames as
