Twitter has posted a response to widespread accusations of censorship in regards to the site’s ‘Trending Topics’ section. Since any mention of “Wikileaks” has disappeared from the trending section normally seen on the right-hand side of the user interface, suspicions have arisen as to Twitter’s possible removal of Wikileaks mentions due to pressure from outside organizations. Earlier in the week, Visa and Mastercard both suspended all donation payments to Wikileaks accounts. PayPal did the same. All three have fallen victim to anonymous attacks from hacker group Operation:Payback in massive DDoS attacks.
Facebook and Twitter both suspended the Operation:Payback accounts that had gone up on their sites. Will either company face retaliation for doing so? Twitter’s blog post today, denying any censorship reasoning, probably aims to defuse any attacks made on the site. The entire post is quoted below.
Posted at 3:57 p.m. PST, a Twitter spokesperson writes:
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Since Twitter first introduced the Trends feature in the summer of 2008, one frequently asked question has been “Why isn’t X trending?”
This question has come up around a variety of subjects, from #justinbieber and #adamlambert to #flotilla, #iranelection and #demo2010.
This week, people are wondering about WikiLeaks, with some asking if Twitter has blocked #wikileaks, #cablegate or other related topics from appearing in the list of top Trends.
The answer: Absolutely not. In fact, some of these terms, including #wikileaks and #cablegate, have previously trended either worldwide or in specific locations.
What is a Trend?
Twitter Trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that attempts to identify topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously. The Trends list is designed to help people discover the ‘most breaking’ breaking news from across the world, in real-time. The Trends list captures the hottest emerging topics, not just what’s most popular. Put another way, Twitter favors novelty over popularity (as BuzzFeed noted in a great article & infographic earlier this week).
What makes a trend a Trend?
Twitter users now send more than 95 million Tweets a day, on just about every topic imaginable. We track of the volume of terms mentioned on Twitter on an ongoing basis. Topics break into the Trends list when the volume of Tweets about that topic at a given moment dramatically increases.
Sometimes a topic doesn’t break into the Trends list because its popularity isn’t as widespread as people believe. And, sometimes, popular terms don’t make the Trends list because the velocity of conversation isn’t increasing quickly enough, relative to the baseline level of conversation happening on an average day; this is what happened with #wikileaks this week.
I gotta say this whole wikileaks thing is totally getting too crazy. Seriously, it is such a super touchy thing due to the fact that there are two very valid perspectives on it. Personally, I think it is not reasonable to feel strongly any way you slice it, you know what I mean? Yeah, it’s obviously a matter of national concern, and it is also a matter of freedom of speech. Surely that there must have to be somewhere we can meet in the middle of it all? And all the ddos attacks happening doesn’t seem seem like it’s going to help us get us any closer to finding a solution, but then who knows for sure…perhaps it’s a necessary evil?