1) Why Isn’t Wikileaks Trending? December 5 Update | When I wrote this piece a week ago I was certain that Twitter wasn’t blocking Wikileaks from trending.
Now I’m not so sure. So the Wikileaks organization released the first batch of a promised quarter million US State Department cables today, and it seems like everyone on the planet is talking about it. The story is front-page news at media sites across the globe, it’s all over the television, and for a while this afternoon more than two percent of all Twitter traffic was about the leaks. You read that right — one in every fifty tweets was about Wikileaks this afternoon. To put that in context, it’s about three times as many as mentioned Justin Bieber. And yet “Wikileaks” hasn’t hit Twitter’s trending topics list all day. 2) New Questions. Update | Click here for an update to this post.
The more I dig, the more I think something weird is going on here. A week ago I wrote a piece on why the hashtag #Wikileaks wasn’t appearing on Twitter’s trending topics lists, concluding that Wikileaks’ failure to trend was an artifact of an actually-quite-reasonable-really algorithm, and shouldn’t be taken as evidence of anything nefarious. Okay. That was then. But in the intervening week, Wikileaks has seen a truly staggering amount of traffic on the site, and still hasn’t trended once. How staggering? Back in the summer, the title of the movie Inception peaked at 0.4% of Twitter traffic, soon stabilizing at about half that. Want more? And here’s my favorite … on five separate occasions in the last week, including eight hours on Friday and two hours on Saturday, “wikileaks” was getting more traffic than “twitter.”
Okay. No. Not exactly. For another thing, not all tweets are equal in Twitter’s eyes. 3) Still More Questions. Feel free to follow Student Activism on Twitter or Facebook, if you like.
You can also read this essay in German, if you like. December 8 Update: Twitter released an official statement on the Wikileaks trending controversy this afternoon. I’ll have a full response soon, but for now I’ll just say that it doesn’t seem to me that it fits the data I’ve presented here. December 11 Update: This has been an absurdly busy week in the world of things-this-blog-is-interested-in, but here it is at long last: How Twitter Kept Wikileaks from Trending, and Why.
Okay, this is a little ridiculous. A week ago, I wrote a piece dismissing the idea that Twitter was actively working to keep Wikileaks out of its trending topics lists. Now I’ve gone back and compared long-term traffic patterns for “Sundays,” one of today’s big global trending topics, with those of “Wikileaks,” and I have to say I’m kind of flabbergasted.
Here. (click each chart to view full size) Why is this significant? Let me repeat that. 4) Twitter censors: How and Why? Feel free to follow Student Activism on Twitter or Facebook, if you like. Over the last few weeks, pointed questions have been raised about the failure of the word “Wikileaks” to appear in Twitter’s trending topics at a time when discussion of the Wikileaks revelations and associated controversies have dominated political discourse around the world. (I wrote three essays on the subject, the first largely dismissive of claims of shenanigans, the second and third much less so.) On Wednesday Twitter finally released an official statement on the controversy. In that statement, they answer the question of whether they’ve blocked Wikileaks from the lists with an “absolutely not,” then go on to provide an overview of what trending is and how it works.
What they have to say will be familiar to those who followed my back-and-forth with company representative Josh Elman on my blog last week, but here are the bullet points: This is all reasonable and plausible, as far as it goes.