Interesting, but is it news? This is what ad-tech does, and what every political party hires advertising and PR agencies and influencers to do. I thought the deal was those trends were talking points for people for whom spending on this is worth it, and that's what made it interesting. It's "what some people will pay to have you to believe," it never occurred to me that social media trends were organic functions of real aggregated human desire. I think (at least young people) have a sense of what is real or not.

Do people not already know that their passive understanding of the world is very tightly managed and orchestrated by people whose job is to be good at it?

> The researchers contacted Twitter twice, with the company acknowledging in both cases the vulnerability in its Trends algorithm. In the first case Twitter declined to make any changes, in the second case the company did not respond to the researchers' follow-up emails.

Treating this issue as a technical "vulnerability," mainly reinforces the idea that Twitter's narrative orchestration is somehow more real.