https://about.twitter.com/safety/council
https://blog.twitter.com/2016/announcing-the-twitter-trust-s...
Unsurprisingly, Twitter's Safety Council members are predominantly left-leaning with ties to the (now defunct) Clinton campaign. I would presume there are plenty of seats to be filled now.
(Spoiler alert: Twitter basically doesn't moderate anything and their department responsible for handling abuse reports doesn't do anything)
I do think that they manually curate their trending sidebar. After Comey announced that the emails on the Wiener laptop were cleared by the FBI, the sidebar looked like this: http://i.imgur.com/9LW0iaU.png
Now, since when do hashtags get an explanation underneath them? Who wrote that explanation and why? Why doesn't it show the amount of tweets below it like every other trend? I had never seen that before.
And in this particular case, if they did manually put that there, I think they're vindicated in the sense that they're actively trying to not spread misinformation. Because if I had gone on twitter and saw "Comey" trending, and I hadn't read about the announcement that she'd been cleared, I'd simply think that a lot of Americans were talking about it within the context of an ongoing investigation, and I'd get the sense that twitter users were collectively rallying against Clinton, rather than for her.
And that, in essence, is the real problem that I have with manual curation by FB/Google/Twitter/etc. People are underestimating how much trust the general population puts into algorithmically produced content, and how much of a betrayal of trust it is for them to inject something into that. They're underestimating just how quickly we've learned to interpret algorithmically produced content and infer certain things about it. And in spite of the fact that the sidebar could have mislead you to think something else was being expressed by those tweeting about Comey than was actually taking place, I also think the public is more aware of the shortcomings of algorithmically produced content than we give them credit for.
If I watch Fox/MSNBC/CNN/etc, I know that there's an implicit bias to the pundits and the guests and the networks themselves. I factor that into whatever content I receive from them.
But when you have Twitter trends that are organically produced 95% of the time, and you silently inject something into that, you've done something much more sinister than a news network leaning towards a particular angle. You've taken a metric that a lot of Americans trust entirely to be reflective of the whole country, and you've elevated a certain few or silenced a few others.
That's significantly more powerful. You can provide the illusion that millions of people do or don't feel a certain way. It's the most dangerous thing to happen this election cycle.