The Sometimes Circular Logic of Twitter’s Trending Timeline

If you see a celebrity trending, don’t automatically assume they died. It might just be their birthday.

Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

Every time a celebrity’s name pops up in Twitter’s trending timeline, I like to play a little game: are they actually dead, or, did they make a politically controversial statement? Unfortunately, that game is sometimes hard to play, since clicking on the person’s name inevitably brings me to a feed of reaction GIFs that offer no context as to what happened.

So why can’t Twitter explain to me why someone is trending on its platform? Is Twitter’s algorithm hopelessly broken, or is there something more complex at play? To figure out the answer, I spent the past week monitoring Twitter’s trends closely in an attempt to find some sort of pattern. The experience was illuminating.

First, my exploration quickly dispelled the common notion that Twitter’s trending pages “never” show anything useful. Quite often, I found that clicking on a topic showed a tweet at the top of the results explaining the news, often from the company’s own Twitter Moments account. A Twitter spokesperson told me they do have a curation team that can add context as a conversation evolves, but that a tweet from the company’s team may not be there when a topic…