Twitter is working on making its Realtime Trends section less confusing. Last week the company announced would start pinning a representative tweet on the trend page that provides more information about a trend and promises further changes would be underway soon. Today, says the company will also start writing headlines and descriptions for some trends, so you'll better understand why something is showing up on the Explore tab or when you tap into a trend itself.
Combined, these changes could have made Twitter's Trends section more like a news reader experience, had they been implemented correctly and completely in the Trends product.
For example, instead of just seeing that rapper "Travis Scott" is trending at number 1, as he is at the time of writing, Twitter now explains via a headline and short summary that he's trending because his menu partnership with McDonald's has just launched. It's helpful, especially since a celebrity's name often trends when they've passed away or said something outrageous.
More trending updates, even more context. We will now add improved headlines and short descriptions to some trends, so that you can get the summary of why something is trending when you are in the Explore tab or tap into a trend. https://t.co/PW2PiYYsQG pic.twitter.com/oOgByMJLME
- Twitter support (@TwitterSupport) 8 September 2020
Unfortunately, Twitter's ability to properly note its trends is still lacking, despite its recent updates.
There are a number of trends that won't offer explanations yet, most notably hashtag-led ones, like today's #IJustDontBelieve, where users tweet about what they don't believe by filling in the rest of the tweet with their own opinions. The long hashtag # BTS2ndNo1ONHot100, led by fans of the KPop group, BTS, is also not noted. For newcomers who aren't familiar with how BTS fans heavily use Twitter or Twitter's Twitter-filled meme popularity, these kinds of trends could be confusing.
In other cases where a trend is not noted, Twitter allows a news headline to add context.
Often, many of the major trends will be centered around the news of the day. But instead of a Twitter-provided summary and headline, you'll instead find a link to a representative news headline listed next to the trend.
"Proud Boys", for example, is the number 17 trend in the US at the time of writing. But Twitter only links to an article on the Daily Beast website that references a violent confrontation between the far-right Proud Boys and protesters. It does not address the attempt to explain why this particular article, which details one of the now many episodes of violence in the United States, is trending. Users, presumably, should assume that the article itself is getting a lot of attention. But in reality, Twitter users are tweeting a variety of content under the "Proud Boys" trend, including their own. video of violent attacks and stalls.
In this way, Twitter is doing a disservice by only pointing to a single news article when people aren't necessarily talking about the article itself, but are sharing direct footage of what they've witnessed or their views on increasing violence in general.
Twitter, meanwhile, has put its curating team to work summarizing the less important news, like a trend on Harry Styles' new look.
Currently, the Trends section of Twitter in the US features a list of 29 trends, but only half a dozen or so have a title or description written by Twitter at the moment.
Twitter He said when he announced the changes last week that the descriptions written by his team of curators aim to provide simple and clear context as to why something is trending on "some" tweets.
What hasn't been clear, however, is how Twitter picked and picked which trends to note.
Twitter, in theory, could have provided much more context on its trends if it had invested more in the product. There are third-party Twitter API partners that can generate data, such as when a trend stops, the speed and number of tweets it's seeing, the social sentiment around the trend, location tweets are generated, and much more. . But this kind of data isn't available directly on Twitter.
Asked why only some of its trends have explanations provided by Twitter, a Twitter spokesperson explained that Twitter will only note those trends it believes need additional information.
"If a trend is particularly confusing and many people are talking about it, a pinned Tweet or description may appear," says the spokesperson. This means that Twitter is making editorial decisions to provide less context when it is needed most.
If, for example, the majority of tweets about a protest were in support or horror of that event, Twitter's ability to contextualize that trend with data would be incredibly helpful. But apparently he's not facing these kinds of tough challenges.
The spokesperson added that Twitter hopes to add more context to more trends over time.