Trump’s presidency was itself a never-ending cycle of social media attention hijacking from the president’s own account, and from coordinated campaigns by far-right influencers.
A feature that was meant to reflect the topics of the day on Twitter by automatically monitoring for rapid swells of post frequency became an opportunity to manipulate the conversation and generate news coverage.ĭays before the 2016 US presidential election, #SpiritCooking trended, amplifying a mini Satanic panic that would evolve into the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Twitter’s argument is that it’s better to work to improve Trends than to retire the feature, emphasizing the role of human curators in providing context and sources for a subset of trending topics.īut despite repeated attempts to address its potential for harm, Trends has remained essentially the same. And in recent years a form of counterprogramming has emerged: deliberate takeovers of racist or otherwise harmful trending topics to flood out the people promoting the objectionable ideas. The #BringBackOurGirls hashtag in 2014 is one example, or 2009’s #IranElection. In 2020 as the US elections approached, Twitter noted, it limited the trending topics that appeared on users’ customized lists to only those with context.Īnd, of course, trending topics have also amplified marginalized voices and become viable tools for activism. And a combination of algorithms and humans now select a representative tweet for some trends to add context.
The site sometimes manually overrides particularly objectionable trends. The company introduced features like Moments, which allowed people to compile conversations unfolding on the app into curated collections. It’s not as if Twitter hasn’t tried to make Trends better.
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