![]() While poking around the platform, I realized it was gathering a horrifying amount of data on me - including when I was using third-party platforms - and I revoked all of those permissions. Twitter’s trending section was one of the ways to get at least a little bit of perspective outside my immediate bubble. Even Google feeds us only the results it thinks we already want if I search for Alex Jones’ defamation trial, for example, which made headlines all week, I don’t see anyone defending him, though I’m certain his fans are rabidly doing so. We’re siloed enough already, getting our news largely off of social media sites, only seeing posts from people we follow. Various political groups have managed to manipulate topics to push them into the trending bar, gleaning greater media coverage and a wider reach.īut narrowing the trending bar is also dangerous. Hashtags such as #gamergate and #SavetheChildren (a QAnon reference) have propelled harassment campaigns and conspiracy theories into the mainstream. There are reasons to try to limit Twitter trends. ![]() Compare the numbers for “American Jews” with everything else on this list. Meanwhile, the trends are actively misleading me at this rate, if something Jewish actually trends, it’s going to be like the Boy Who Cried Wolf and I’m going to ignore it. (Though Twitter might I’m sure it pays higher ad dividends.)Įven if I scroll forever, that just tells me what the cadre of Jews and journalists I follow are talking about - a rather small slice of society. Its slogan is “what’s happening and what people are talking about right now.” Yet suddenly it’s quite difficult to tell what people are talking about unless I scroll for hours - not a habit I want to encourage in myself. Twitter has, for years, marketed itself as a public square it’s why the platform didn’t bar Trump despite calls to do so. Even there, a selection of the topics are actually paid promotions - hashtags about movies or TV shows or new products that no one is actually talking about. To be fair, it’s still possible to see broader trends if you navigate to the Explore section of the site. But until recently, the code seemed quite good at telling what was actually an emerging discourse and what was just ambient chitchat. I am not an engineer, so I have no idea how the algorithm distinguishes between the low murmur of every topic on earth being constantly discussed online and a notable event. But she doesn’t trend every week, and she does when she puts out an album, as she did last week. ![]() Or Beyoncé - people are always talking about Beyoncé. Not a few dozen talking about their love for Hashem.Ī word appearing frequently doesn’t, by itself, constitute a trend if it did, vague-but-common topics like “politics” and “music” would constantly be trending. But the whole point of Twitter’s trending section is to alert you to an event or discourse that is, well, trending - that is, to be clear, when lots of people are all talking about the same thing. I tried to contact Twitter to ask what had changed, to no avail. But it seems as though Twitter has recently narrowed its algorithms further - so far as to be useless. ![]()
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