Twitter Censoring Trending Topics? Isn't It About Time?
Tonight, the bored and lonely segment of Twitter users banded together to push three sexy, raunchy, and totally inappropriate terms into the trending topics leaderboard.
Within minutes (as far as we could tell), both terms were removed from the list on the web interface at Twitter.com. However, they still showed up on third party services such as TwitScoop and Hashtags.org. We feel this blog's cachet and provenance do not allow for the repetition of such phrases, so you'll have to check out the screen shots below and gasp in mock horror along with us.
And as of this moment, none of these terms are anywhere to be found on the Twitter website, although they all were a mere 10 minutes ago.
As asinine, spammy, emo, and pointless as trending topics have been in the recent past, why now is the Twitter team choosing to censor that list on their website? Is it the overtly sexual nature of the terms, or the fact that some people would consider those words indecent or profane?
Perhaps this will serve as a nice wake-up call to the team that the trending topics list is rather broken to begin with. Many sites lately have noted that the hashtags only serve as spam fodder, allowing questionable marketers to quickly stuff tweets with the terms to gain more attention for themselves. However, it seems at first glance that the majority of these tweets are coming from honest-to-god users, which is more frightening still. Whether or not the trending-topic tweets are spam, the topics themselves are very often sheer horror to peruse.
Should there be an algorithm for trends rather than making trending topics a pure numbers game? Should the system be fixed so that #liesboystell doesn't win out over truly important, significant, or newsworthy content? Should tweets, like images and other kinds of content, be screened for "adult" material and user preferences be set accordingly? Or do trends really belong to the lowest common denominator?
Some will probably respond that, as a purely statistical measurement, trending topics should fall under a laissez faire system, in which case censorship of those topics would be inaccurate reporting as well as suppression of free speech.
But the world already has Nickelback and Ugg boots; must we let the masses decide on Twitter trends, as well?
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We're not censoring trending topics for a reason: we want to reflect what twitter really is. If people decide to be dumb, or rude, let it be. What next ? Censoring things for politicial reasons ? Come on...
Right now, Earthquake became a hot topic on twitscoop, still nowhere to be seen on Twitter.
I prefer accurate, fast emerging trending topics than slow, manually censored ones.
Our two cents...
Pierre-
Most definitely! There's a place for that, and I think it's important. My real beef was that Twitter can't call trends "trends" if they're going to arbitrarily remove some. It's my choice whether or not to look at the tweets, no?
As much as I avoid the types of memes usually in the Trending Topics list, if Twitter is removing them, they should change the title from "Trending Topics" to "Suggested Topics."
Julie- agreed (in fact it's more your title which made me jump than the rest of your article).
To make things perfectly clear:
1. Twitscoop has a proprietary algorithm for trends, which in no way is solely related to how many times something is tweeted (that would be too easy to game, and that's why twitter have to moderate manually their trends, which, I agree, can't be called trends).
2. We don't treat hashtags differently than normal words. i.e. hashtags are usefull to gather people around a specific topic, but tweeting a hashtag over and over has no influence what so ever on our hot trends and tag cloud.
3. I wish you had taken your screenshot from twitscoop.com ;-)
Personally I think it's about time they did censor it, or perhaps somehow categorised them better. The asnine and ridiculous topics that trend of late damage what made Twitter powerful in the first place.
I think that there is room here for a third-party service to categorise trends better, it would be even more powerful if this was incorporated into Twitter. For example, it's clear Twitter has a heavy US user base, that's fine, but I don't particularly care that "Conan" is trending. That's not saying the US shouldn't, but some way of identifying trends by country or perhaps category (don't show me US TV shows) would really help.
This need not effect the real-time nature - many topics trend on a regular basis, even optionally cutting these out would be useful.
Actually, that might be the easiest option - let users self censor, so if there are topics I find offensive or just don't want to see in my Top 10, I could block them. Perhaps how people self censor could then feed back into an algorithm to automate this process for those that choose it.
I am happy twitter filter these to not appear on trending topics because no meaning of these topics in Twitter does dilute the concept of twitter with Porn words I even want to see Twitter filtering out tweets with porn words and suspend who users who promote these sort of things immediately.
All the junk messages in #iranelection are from people thinking they are helping retweeting everything all the time. The only time I use it is to occasionally tell people how to use Tor to get around firewalls in Iran. Some people don't check their Twitter account every ten seconds or even everyday. When they check their homepage they see messages from people they follow. If there's old information still sitting in their homepage they retweet it thinking they're helping when actually they are just confusing people wondering if it's new news or old news or if it's totally false. I have no idea how to clean up hashtags.
Also please setup a Tor relay and help bring down the Iran Curtain!
http://cli.gs/1YZ0gB
Great way to present the issue! Impressed / admiring of how you framed it all!
And of course wasn't there a time when Twitter didn't do anything but allow us to tweet and that was what made it so simple, so brilliantly unique?
Plenty of other people can do Tweet search better than twitter, so why is twitter foolish / arrogant enough to upstage them?
Hey Twitter!
KSS!!!
Don't try so hard to justify your venture capital, let the real developers of twitter do their thing and stay out of their way!
Please Twitter, don't dominate / pollute Twitterland with self-induced reactionary censure simply because of your inane unsophisticated search feature.
Of course this presupposes that Twitter exists for more than just the propagation of inane and unsophisticated features / tweets / etc. ?
I'm a big fan of racecar driver Gary Oddick, so that's why I put #gooddick
I am not sure which could be considered worse;
Allowing 'topics' from the most prurient denominator?
Or filtering/censoring to mollify the most prudish denominator?
I personally think that prudes like venkat should not be protected from peoples right to talk openly on topics that they might find personally offensive.
There is an awful lot of asinine 'topics' on Twitter that even I find offensive, but I 'choose' to not click on the link to find out any more about them.
As Voltaire almost probably didn't say;
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
right, Twitter is blocking inappropriate topics, but I'm still surprised none of the main tech blogs mentioned Facebook not being among the trends last Saturday, when they launched the vanity URLs, while you could see it in other sites, such as Twist, at the top positions. http://twist.flaptor.com/?span=168&gram=facebook
even using Twitter search you could tell there were way more mentions per minute than the top trend at that moment (#iremember) http://twist.flaptor.com/?span=168&gram=facebook%2C+%23iremember
am I being paranoid or was Twitter really blocking Facebook from becoming a trend that day?
That's the natural evolution of social network services. With the flow of time, Twitter's signal to noise ratio will decrease, as userbase grows and the intelligence level of an average twitterer gets lower. Censor it or not, there is nothing Twitter team can do about it in the long term. Thus, in future we'll see even more stupid trending topics on Twitter. At some point of time stupid trending topics will become a majority; by this time, most of the early adopters will migrate out of Twitter.
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I appreciate the censorship. I can imagine a scenario where I wish it wasn't there, or I might wish there was a better system. But it's better than nothing.
Considering that the US State Department is who told Twitter to stay active instead of going down for maintenance during the Iran protests, and now Twitter is starting to censor words, even if they are a little "racy", that sets the precedent. If it's "okay" to censor those hashtags, where do we draw the line? Twitter was mentioned in the Virginia Fusion Center Terrorism Threat Assessment as a "tool" used by domestic terrorists, so they already know how powerful it is and how we can be organized.
Free speech is under attack, and this is just one of the tiny battles we'll have to face in the coming future.
Reminds me (loosely) of when Digg first got super popular and some people figured out how to effectively & consistently get stories on the homepage. Made the homepage pretty lame when only a small group of power users were gaming the system. Kinda defeated the whole purpose of finding out what "most" people were really discussing/liking/searching for on the web.
for better or worse, letting the masses decide is what makes twitter twitter. like @jack said, it's all about approach, transparency and immediacy. as we've seen with the @replies fail, an approach that involves too much filtering could kill the platform's appeal.
for more, check out my recent post on the subject: http://www.springbox.com/insight/post/Do-Hashtags-Still-Matter-on-Twitter.aspx
Unnecessary kitty picture FTW!
It is hard to run a site and be fair without getting abused by spammers and just plain bad content. I have to censor a video website daily, and I understand that. But words? I mean video can get pretty raunchy but how offended can you get by 140 chars? The other day someone tweeted that they blame drew's cancer for something, rather than blaming drew's cancer on something, that to me is worse than dick and pussy jokes, so who decides what words are bad and who watches the watchmen?
Great! Those stupid memes are useless to those of us who just want to know what the current news-related trends are. Maybe they should just separate them into "trending topics" and "current memes." Then everybody would be happy.
Hi Jolie,
What is the official comment from Twitter HQ about this?
Jollie - Thank you for bringing this topic to our attention and putting it up for discussion.
Honestly, to all the folks using twitter: How many people value their time? Getting flooded with spam, porn, and junk mail takes moments out of our life that eventually builds up to hours and days that cannot be retrieved. It's a total waste of time and there should be a way to effectively and efficiently delete trash.
There are many geniuses out there and folks who have already posted comments who may be part of the solution.
Twitter already is filtering trending topics.
For example; when Facebook opened registration for vanity URLS, Twitter was a buzz -- but at no time did "facebook" or even "fb" ever trend. NEVER. So the fact that Twitter is filtering Facebook (and lord knows what else) but not the terms you were able to trend is very alarming.
Speaking of filtering, you might look at reviewing the comments. #13 has nothing to do with your article - crammed with "teeth whitening" links.
Timmy - agreed. They should just change the "Trending Topics" into "Suggested Topics" and have a separate section for Trending Topics that don't have any censorship.
@Brandon - I wish I knew. =)
I recently posted some of my thought on the topic here- http://bit.ly/17b4rF. Basically Twitter needs to officially support hashtags/microsyntax.
Good posting and well put. A couple of comments on trending tools in general. I almost fell over one day when terms around bailout, Chrysler, etc appeared and there were Twitter posts about the fact they were trending. What exactly did they expect?! Of course they're going to trend when they are at the top of the news. And when employees started to get laid off, the kind and gentle Twits posted that layoffs was a trending term. How terribly thoughtful of you all. i'm sure everyone being laid off appreciated the support. Trending is a numbers game no matter what algorithm is used and I seldom see a real value in playing the game. The exception is when trending reveals hidden movements that may be indicative of something odd, interesting, or important going on. That takes some analysis and some real thought and is seldom (note: seldom,not never) seen in a free app, a few posts and a cute cloud. So Iran is trending and everyone is turning a shade of green. What has anyone learned from the exercise? Except maybe that if you RT...
> Should the system be fixed so that #liesboystell doesn't win out over truly important, significant, or newsworthy content?
I don't think so.
Twitter memes like "#liesboystell" is to "#iranelection" as "American Idol" is to "NBC Nightly News". They both have a place in their medium.
Part of what makes "trending topics" great is that they give insight into the collective subconscious. If twitter tried to use "trending topics" to influence the debate I suspect it would fail and quickly would become irrelevant.
Of course they are being censored.
I have done some tracking over the last few weeks of the "f"-word's frequency vs. the frequency of other trending topics. As it seems, f**k should be a trending topic quite often - but alas, my numbers may be way off twitscoop would know things like this a little better.
So, what's the deal, we're worried that somehow, by removing certain topics, Twitter somehow is less "credible", that it loses its cachet as a serious news aggregator? Or would leaving them in do that? Either way, that's too funny...
That being said, I'm not gonna get up on my censorship high-horse over some thwarted attempt to graffiti the Trending Topics list.
I'm so glad they did that. I have children I had to keep slamming my laptop down every time my 8 YO daughter came to speak to me. Why should I have to do that?
Many people gave excellent solutions to wanting to see certain trends. Perhaps Twitter should consider them.
I'm in no means a prude. But there is a time and place for those kinds of things and a public place where children (even those that are teenagers) have access to is not one of them.
This has happened before. They censored 420 and all things referring to drugs on April 20th. They censor a lot, and probably all curse words, considering that a curse word pops up every two seconds on cursebird.com
When I look at tweets right now, I decide if I want to look at them or not. Just because it is there, doesn't mean I have to look at it! If the Twitterverse is being silly and a trending topic is #cheeseinacan, I would rather see that stated accurately than having Twitter decide that #Obamadogpeesinovaloffice is more important because he's the president, even if it's not exactly a trending topic like #cheeseinacan.
Bottomline: Let the twitterverse decide what they want to read. If you oppress some people to make the more....conservative tweeters more comfortable, then you're going to alienate a group of people. Once you do that, there will be another group of people who come on and are offended by what the group you were originally catering to is tweeting about, so you'll censor that. And the cycle continues when another group of people gets offended! Sure, not everyone is going to want to read about #tetristurns20, but maybe since I grew up on Tetris, I do want to read what people are saying. Just as much as people have the right (whether they think they do or not) not to click on every link on their homepage, I have the right to know what the twitterverse is ACTUALLY talking about, and not just what Twitter thinks is "appropriate", "important", or "relevant" for me to know that it's being talked about.
Trending Topics is mostly useless for me. It would be a lot more useful if I could limit it to the people I am following.
In response, I created @RightTopics, an account that tweets Twitter Search results for topics that appear to be trending among political conservatives. I manually identify trending topics, produce a Twitter Search for the topics, and tweet the link on @RightTopics. @RightTopics follows tweeters who have 1000+ followers and a clear record of discussing matters of interest to conservatives. I would like to get a trend-cloud of those followers and use those results to identify topics to tweet. Since I don't currently know how to do this, I use TweetCloud to determine the trending words among tweets containing any of a number of hashtags.
I haven't received any feedback about it, but it seems to be attracting followers who don't meet the criteria for it following them. I've also started two more services for other audiences, and am developing a process for training people how do to what I am doing (so I don't have to run all of these accounts myself).
I see the trending topics as simply the lowest possible denominator. We're currently trying to study eating habits using twitter - and to do so, we couldn't simply count words that appear - they need context.
To improve the usefulness of Twitter Trends, an algorithm is needed. However, I suspect that's not the point. The API is there. I reckon twitter expect people to dislike the trending - and go make better engines. They seem themselves as a service I guess - to be utilised and mangled by the worlds brains.
Their trending is food for thought, rather than a decent search engine.....
Our Twitter account @deadzones seems to no be censored or blocked by the syndication and search results all for using terms like Government. Twitter needs to fix this quickly or they will start losing even more loyal users.
You can easily and quickly find out who, what or which tweets are being censored by Twitter.
To see WHO Twitter Is censoring - Search for the user's name in Twitter Search. If that user only show ups in RTs, THEY ARE BEING CENSORED from Twitter Search and therefore from the Twitter Timeline.
You can also use this same method to see if Twitter is censoring YOU: Tweet then look for yourself in Twitter Search. If your tweet (or you) can not be found, or If you (or that tweet) only show up in RTs, YOU ARE BEING CENSORED from Twitter Search and therefore from the Twitter Timeline.
Ive been noticing less and less negative items on twitter's trending topics in the last few weeks. Maybe they have upped their algs?
None the less. That black hat seo will always be around and will continue to make money with its sketchy tactics.
I think it is great that there is some decency left. I choose moral decency over censorship every day. That is just me, and I'm glad that Twitter has the the freedom to determine what stays up on the their network. I wish there were more people and companies who were trying to keep inappropriate material from polluting our minds and hearts and leading our society down the slippery slope.
I also laugh at all the comments where we stand up against indecency when it comes to keeping children from seeing or hearing something that is bad, they aren't the ones we should be worried about, it is the adults.
Twitter is about freedom of speech, therefore trending topics, which are all user-generated should not be censored. If that's the case, why not censor all the videos on YouTube while your at it.