Is Snowden not Being Allowed to Trend on Twitter? | Hacker News Reader

Is Snowden not Being Allowed to Trend on Twitter?

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72 pointssingular22 comments

In my top 10, I have #Snowden, Cuba, Russia, Hong Kong, and Moscow. So for me Snowden is dominating as he currently has half of the trends. People are a little too quick to jump on the conspiracy theory bandwagon.

Right. Good anedocte about how many HNers upvote without even thinking.

It's trivial to block at country level.

Strangely, it doesn't appear in the US trend list, nor in the worldwide one.

To be fair to the OP, he asked a question whether it is trending or not.

No, the question is "Is Snowden not being allowed to trend on Twitter"? Leading question. Also, within the post itself "Why is Snowden not trending" (grammar corrected by me) and the title "Proof Snowden should be trending" in all caps no less.

It's pretty clear the idea is to imply there's a conspiracy. Everything is a conspiracy.

"PROOF SNOWDEN SHOULD BE TRENDING"

Possibly for the same reason Wikileaks weren't trending when they were all over the media - http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/12/09/twitter-trends-...

#snowden is trending for me:

http://i.imgur.com/ISYwKLD.png

Sites like Facebook and Twitter don't treat all users alike when it shows them what is trending.

Confirmed, I had to drop the default "tailored trends" setting & switch back to United States trends to get back #snowden in the list.

Bubbles are a bad thing - not sure if they are just a bad thing sometimes, or all of the time.

Trending for me as well in Berlin

Same here in .nl

Love that "Twinkies" is also trending haha.

Also, Twitter trends aren't based on volume. It's more about change in volume.

Correct. Twitter changed their algorithm to this in 2010 to solve the Justin Bieber problem.

http://mashable.com/2010/05/14/twitter-improves-trending-top...

I think that's exactly what's going on here. Snowden has been a popular topic on Twitter for days now, so it's likely that those other terms have had bigger volume changes recently.

Same topic will not trend after it has been trending for a while. Or else, #bieber will trend forever. After a while it might trend again.

Now trending for me in Montreal, so I changed locations. New York, Providence, New Haven and Phoenix. Also trending for US as a whole.

The algo for Twitter isn't straightforward, and may even have human checks to prevent gaming.

I get 'Edward Snowden' as a tailored trend in the UAE as well

Another example of this is how Justin Bieber isn't constantly trending, but if he uses a new hashtag that tag will trend.

If so then this is the first censorship of its kind in the US in the modern era (as far as I remember).

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