Bubbloy on Twitter censorship of #Wikileaks
It might well be that #Wikileaks is failing to trend simply because of the algorithm failing to pick it up for whatever reason. However, I must say, that would imply that Twitter has written perhaps one of the most abysmal Trend Identification algorithms it could have possibly written. If the goal of the algorithm was to pick up events of importance, popularity or any other meaningful social metric, Twitter would have failed miserably in this aim, and would truly start looking into developing a new one.
He’s got some interesting data with insights from Student Activist and Twitter. I get that Twitter is all about organic promotion and whatnot, but that #Wikileaks is not trending seems off to me. At some point, We The People need issues like this — particularly if they’re as wildly popular as the graphs seem to indicate in this case — to be “promoted” for broader discussion in the interests of the public good. There’s actually a role for Twitter in this discussion and an algorithm that is ignorant of such a capital-I-Important issue is failing the public good on that count.