Well, while my image above isn’t great, it was a snapshot taken at 11:50, 2/26/2016, in which “#whichHillary” remains a trending topic. (Below GOPDebates and MelissaClick.. and will probably soon be surpassed by Drop Luke to Free Kesha, but that’s another story).
So, how does the twitter system work? Well, first, you need to realize the “trending” list is not controlled by humans. The Twitter trending system is the product of a complex algorithm that looks for a few key things:
- How often something is being tweeted as a hashtag
- Weight for that hashtag
- User Interaction with that hashtag
- non-interaction with hashtag
- The region in which the hashtag is trending. Note: today, I’m watching the St. Louis region in my feed.
So, I just want to say this because sometimes we go through the rabbit hole. Twitter keeps track of thousands of regions throughout America and divides up trending topics for that region. It’s why stories like SJR in Missouri will likely start trending, and probably nowhere else. This is a metric method of keeping track of “popular in your area”. You can get even more in-depth with hashtag trending at hashtag.org.
The system is designed not just to look at how often something is being tweeted, but the “weight” of the tweet. In other words, if someone with a million followers tweets #ILikeIceCream, then #ILikeIceCream has a much better chance to trend than if someone who has 20 followers says the same thing.
This weighting system is part of what is designed to make twitter relevant; in order to keep that up, though, twitter uses micro-samples and long-samples. So if, #FREEKESHA gets some tweets today, a few tomorrow, etc. it doesn’t ever get onto the trending list because it never established enough at a time; more importantly, if a topic seems to fade, then the algorithm quickly demotes topics in order to promote new conversation topics, something twitter actually owns IP patents on.
This has caused twitter to be repeatedly accused to demoting long-term topics because twitter’s algorithm doesn’t like a trend lasting for too long.. if folks remember Ferguson, the twitter hashtag changed several times, and there were also accusations of it being knocked out through some censorship method.
MIT did a study of this and found that the twitter algorithm starts to disregard flat retweets by low-weight users because the algorithm values those less than it values new start topics, a method twitter developed so it would always be “first to an issue” and allow people to see quickly rising topics ahead of long-standing ones.
Because of this algorithm method, issues like SJR took less than an hour to trend in Missouri, and the shooting in Hesston, Kansas began trending within 40 minutes from start.
Twitter’s method of early detection is something it considers to be a serious selling point, and has been a big part of their pitch as the “fastest” way to find new and trending topics.
So, in a quick check in regions throughout America by changing my region option, “WhichHillary" was trending in 16 of the 31 regions I tested. As an note, however, “Pokemon” was trending in only three, and “Hesston" was trending in four, and #FridayFeeling in 9.
This is kind of the makeup of twitter; an algorithm that finds function in each region, trends within a region, weights tweets, and then determines the trend list by locally spawned comments by weighted users who are then mixed with retweet + content in a condensed period.
What About User Bannings?
Twitter doesn’t outright ban users, normally, unless they harass someone. But they can stop you for too many tweets in a time period, retweeting yourself too often, etc. This is also not done by a human but done through a different algorithm that is designed to prevent spammers from filling up their trending list.
Imagine if spammers simply had to repetitively tweet to climb up the trends list. You’d see trends like: “#CALL18005551212” and “#PETS.COM”. Using a script with an API connection, I could tweet several thousand times a second the same message over and over and over again with some variation to move up the trend list.
Twitter’s inbuilt system is designed to prevent that by looking for too many “in similar” content over a time period; and when it detects it, the account is temporarily “muted” normally for a cooling off period that breaks robot-drones that just want to repost, and merely annoys people.. sometimes helping to break a fight up as well ;)
Regions aren’t the only way to follow trending topics
While I have checked “by regions” users may also set their “trending topics" to focus on certain areas (entertainment, sports, etc. etc.) or by certain users, and the twitter algorithm will adjust trending topics presented to them based on their preferences.
In other words: during baseball season, my twitter feed is almost guaranteed for me to be half baseball because of my follow list and selections.
Conclusion:
I understand the need to feel as though there was a censorship effort — I’ve seen this concern before. And, I’m certain something ‘could’ be possible, but showing WhichHillary come up in the plurality of districts I checked this morning tells me it depends on what region and zone you are in, the preferences you have set, and more importantly, when it started and who is continuing it.
In other words; before we start blaming an algorithm or evil people, maybe there is a more direct answer.
Carry on.