Twitter will now attempt to explain why some trending topics have made it to that section. The micro-blogging site announced today that it will start adding representative tweets and descriptions that will more clearly explain certain trends.
These representative tweets will be pinned to some trending topics, meaning Twitter won"t show additional context for each trending topic since some of them can be easily understood. The pinned tweets will be chosen by Twitter’s human curators aided by its algorithms, identifying whether a tweet accurately represents a trend. Its algorithms will also detect only representative tweets that do not fall under the classification of abuse, spam, or misleading tweets. Pinned tweets are live starting today on iOS and Android, with a web version coming soon.
Twitter is also rolling out brief descriptions to some trends in order to provide more insights on popular topics. Descriptions will be available on Twitter"s iOS, Android, and web versions over the next few weeks.
The latest changes are launching in the U.S., Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Egypt, France, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Spain, the UK, and the United Arab Emirates. Twitter noted that users posted tweets asking why certain topics were trending more than half a million times last year, so it"s hoping to add more context to trends with today"s announcement.