2 posts tagged “trending topics”

Has Twitter trending topics gotten too spammy?  It's a question we've needed to address since the moment Twitter introduced trending topics, which were once relegated to Twitter's search page and now display on all public Twitter pages.  But a recent incident with a group of pranksters on the anonymous forum 4chan is pushing the limits of Twitter's ability to deal with trending topics-related spam.

The 4chan prank has not only pushed an offensive term through to the trending topics, but did so as a result of several fake accounts that have been created in order to do so.  It's the creation of the fake accounts that minimizes Twitter's ability to curb spam and the people behind it.  
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While it's easy enough to create regulations on what terms can be pushed through as a trending topic, and subsequently easy enough to remove an offensive trending topic, it's not as easy to get rid of the fake accounts behind it.  From keeping up with the creation of fake accounts to the measures necessary to ensure that a suspended or terminated account is indeed fake, there's a lot more to deal with than just the spam itself.

It's an issue that Digg was once notorious for having to deal with, leading to a series of changes made to the very way in which Digg operates.  Perhaps a complete overhaul for the way in which Twitter manages and promotes trending topics is in order, but that would require careful monitoring and decisions on an executive level.  As Twitter is working towards building close relationships with advertising brands, trending topics is likely to be one channel by which marketing can readily take place.

We've discussed ways in which Twitter could curb trending topics spam here on MultisocialMedia.  Certain cues and user behavior are ways in which Twitter can begin to determine which users are spamming and which accounts are fake.  But as we've seen with many platforms, from Digg to Facebook, a great deal of ongoing tweaks to platform regulations and users' terms of service is a necessary growing pain.

See here for more.

This post was written by Matthew Kraft (@MKraft) spends entirely too much time online. One of these days that will pay off, as will all those years he spent reading obscure literature in grad school.

Last week I was researching Swine Flu/H1N1 for a client, using Twitter. The WHO had just upgraded the pandemic to Phase 6, so lots of people were talking about it. This looked like it would make my job easy--use Trending Topics to take the temperature of the Twitterverse, as it were. It turned out to be more like getting a room full of kindergartners to tell you about their pets while an ambulance screams by - you may get some information, but it's mostly useless blathering and screaming.

Trending Topics has the possibility to be a really useful tool, from both a research point of view and a marketing perspective. Want to find out not only what the Twitterverse is talking about, but *how* they're talking about it? This is your place. It's zeitgeist central for the hottest communication tool on the planet. However, since Trending Topics came to the front of everyone's twitter homepage, the increase in spam is immense.  Today, it's a pretty safe can bet that any trending topic is half-full of bandwagon-jumpers and coattail-riders, spammers who throw up topic keywords just to get on the front page of results.

This phenomenon wouldn't be so bad were it not for three things:

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