Twitter trends

On X, formerly and colloquially known as Twitter, a word, phrase, or topic that is mentioned at a greater rate than others is said to be a "trending topic" or simply a "trend". Trending topics become popular either through a concerted effort by users or because of an event that prompts people to talk about a specific topic.^[1]

Countries and cities with local trending topics in Twitter

Trending topics are sometimes the result of concerted efforts and manipulations by fans of certain celebrities or cultural phenomena. Twitter has altered the trend algorithm in the past to prevent manipulation of this type with limited success.^[2]

Impact

Examples of high-impact topics include the wildfires in San Diego,^[3] the earthquake in Japan,^[4] popular sporting events,^[5] and political uprisings in Iran^[6] and Egypt.^[7]

Controversies

Twitter often censors trending hashtags that are claimed to be abusive or offensive. Twitter censored the #Thatsafrican^[8] and #thingsdarkiessay hashtags after users complained that they found the hashtags offensive.^[9] There are allegations that Twitter removed #NaMOinHyd from the trending list and added an Indian National Congress-sponsored hashtag.^[10]

In 2019, 20% of the global trends were found to be fake, created automatically using fake and compromised accounts originating from Turkey. It is reported that 108,000 accounts were employed since 2015 to push 19,000 keywords such as advertisements and political campaigns, to top trends in Turkey by bulk tweeting.^[11]

See also

•  Companies portal

• Twitter usage—How various people and organizations use Twitter

References

1. . Archived from the original on July 18, 2011. Retrieved April 3, 2010.
2. Vicky Woollaston. . Webuser.co.uk. Archived from the original on November 22, 2012. Retrieved January 20, 2012.
3. Wang, Zheye; Ye, Xinyue; Tsou, Ming-Hsiang (August 1, 2016). "Spatial, temporal, and content analysis of Twitter for wildfire hazards". Natural Hazards. 83 (1): 523–540. doi:10.1007/s11069-016-2329-6. ISSN 1573-0840. S2CID 130442050.
4. Sakaki, Takeshi; Okazaki, Makoto; Matsuo, Yutaka (2010). "Earthquake shakes Twitter users". Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web. WWW '10. New York, NY, US: ACM. pp. 851–860. doi:10.1145/1772690.1772777. ISBN 9781605587998. S2CID 15953846.
5. Nichols, Jeffrey; Mahmud, Jalal; Drews, Clemens (2012). "Summarizing sporting events using twitter". Proceedings of the 2012 ACM international conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. IUI '12. New York, NY, US: ACM. pp. 189–198. doi:10.1145/2166966.2166999. ISBN 9781450310482. S2CID 15696890.
6. Burns, Alex; Eltham, Ben (November 24, 2009). "Twitter Free Iran: an Evaluation of Twitter's Role in Public Diplomacy and Information Operations in Iran's 2009 Election Crisis" (PDF). University of Technology, Sydney: 322–334. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
7. Choudhary, Alok; Hendrix, William; Lee, Kathy; Palsetia, Diana; Liao, Wei-Keng (May 1, 2012). "Social media evolution of the Egyptian revolution". Communications of the ACM. 55 (5): 74. doi:10.1145/2160718.2160736. S2CID 41959904.
8. Weiner, David (June 21, 2009). "#Thatsafrican – When Twitter Went Racist?". Huffington Post. Retrieved April 3, 2010.
9. "Thingsdarkiessay causes a Twitter storm". Independent Online. South Africa. November 5, 2009. Retrieved January 11, 2012.
10. Gupta, Kanchan (August 13, 2013). . NITI Central. Archived from the original on August 16, 2013. Retrieved August 14, 2013.
11. Elmas, Tuğrulcan; Overdorf, Rebekah; Özkalay, Ahmed Furkan; Aberer, Karl (2021). "Ephemeral Astroturfing Attacks: The Case of Fake Twitter Trends". 6th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy. Virtual: IEEE. arXiv:1910.07783.