trends

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Trends is a feature on social media silos that shows the some of the most popular hashtags (AKA Trending hashtags), links, news articles, words, or phrases that are being used or cited in posts, and have been criticized on Facebook & Twitter for being manipulated by bots and/or showing conspiracy theories at the top.

IndieWeb Examples

Aaron Parecki

Aaron Parecki shows a list of "top posts" on monthly archive pages. The posts are ranked by a combination of reposts, likes and replies.

• https://aaronparecki.com/2021/03

Silo Examples

Facebook

(stub) Facebook

(needsscreenshots)

• Facebook trends show that Elon Musk has deleted Facebook pages for SpaceX and Tesla

Twitter

(stub) Twitter

(needsscreenshots)

Criticism

State Level Actor Manipulation

Facebook and Twitter have been criticized for not recognizing or identifying when trending hashtags may be the result of bot accounts run by state level actors (e.g. Russia) artificially inflating the popularity of particular politically motivated hashtags.

• 2018-01-31 Democrats lashed Facebook and Twitter for not fully investigating if Russian bots spread the #ReleasetheMemo campaign

Showing Conspiracy Theories First

Facebook has been criticized for showing conspiracy theories at the top of their "People Are Saying" for news articles in their Trending News section.

• 2018-01-31: Facebook Pushes ‘False Flag’ Amtrak Conspiracies in Trending Section

• 2018-01-31: from: https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/958786714562105345

Brainstorming

Things you could include on an IndieWeb site's "trending" page:

• Recent posts with a lot of responses
• List of recently/frequently used tags or keywords

See Also

• aggregation
• hashtag
• Facebook Master Algorithm
• "Here is a killer quote for all you growth managers from @ndiakopoulos ‘trending is over’ and he is right. https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/bots-manipulate-trends.php" @emilybell April 3, 2018
• Apparently influences POTUS45: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/27/trump-tweets-that-twitters-t.html
• Criticism: https://twitter.com/mozilla/status/1311399166338367497
  • "Twitter’s ‘trends’ feature is a mechanism by which misinformation can gain vitality.
    
    Help stop the spread of #misinformation on @Twitter in the run-up to the US election.
    
    Join our call to #UnTrendTwitter: https://mzl.la/3hW1AyN
    
    #UnTrendOctober #USElection2020" @mozilla September 30, 2020
• Criticism: low quality content is rapidly amplified: https://twitter.com/kateconger/status/1314597534623391749
  • "Third, Twitter is adding context tabs for ALL trends seen in the "For You" pages of users in the United States. Trends have been blamed for a lot of low-quality content going viral. I wrote about earlier efforts to fact-check Trends here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/technology/twitter-trending-topics.html" @kateconger October 9, 2020
• 2020 Mozilla: #UnTrendTwitter
• Example: GitHub trending: https://github.com/trending which they used to tweet (https://twitter.com/TrendingGithub) until 2018, and which they’d planned to deprecate, and then rolled back their plans based on user feedback: https://github.com/community/community/discussions/31644