Who Really Writes Twitter’s ‘Trending’ Summaries
‘Twitter description guy’ isn’t a guy. It’s Twitter’s curation team, and I talked to the woman who runs it.
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“Twitter description guy,” in users’ collective imagination, is a beleaguered soul, constantly scrambling to comprehend the bizarre subcultural memes that go viral on the site so that he can write sober-minded summaries of them for Twitter’s trending section. In December, Twitter’s description of a Minecraft-related trending topic led Twitch streamers and gamers to imagine a beleaguered “Twitter description guy”. They worked to make #TwitterGuyIsOverParty a trending hashtag in hopes that said Twitter guy would be forced to write a description of his own cancellation.
There is, of course, no single “Twitter description guy.” The descriptions are written by Twitter’s curation team, which is run by Joanna Geary, Twitter’s senior director for curation. To better understand how the curation team views its job, I spoke with her in February.
“Our goal is to give you the gist so you’re not spending five minutes looking at the trend trying to figure out what it even means,” she told me.
The trending module, which highlights words or phrases that are suddenly appearing in far more tweets than usual, has long been one of Twitter’s defining features. It has gone through several names and iterations over the years, and today it’s most visible in the Twitter app’s “Explore” tab or in a sidebar called “What’s happening” on the Twitter website.
By any name, trending topics are an open window into the messy, beating heart of a service that’s built on public conversations about current issues. Sometimes the picture they show is funny or uplifting; sometimes it’s ugly; and sometimes it’s just baffling. Other times they’re a vector for misinformation, spreading false or misleading memes to a much wider audience than would have otherwise encountered them. Paradoxically, attempts by Twitter users to debunk a false meme can result in it trending more widely because the algorithm takes the debunkings as a further signal of the meme’s popularity as a discussion topic. I wrote last year about how this dynamic led the phrase “Covid-19 is a lie” to trend in California.
