Twitter Joanna Gearyoremus Onezero: Q&A with Twitter’s senior director of curation Joanna Geary on how her team decides which trends to summarize and how to contextualize them, more
“If we are summarizing a trending topic and the person is not interested in hearing about it, then we drop it.” -Joanna Geary
Twitter is one of the best news sources for anyone looking for current events or breaking news. However, finding interesting topics that users may not have seen before can be tough. In this interview, Geary describes how her team decides what’s a trending topic and how they go about contextualizing the trends they summarize.
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What is trending on Twitter?
Trending is what you see on Twitter when you search for a topic. It shows you the top tweets in response to your keyword, and it shows you those that are “trending.” A keyword might be something like “Presidential election.” What happens is, we scan Twitter. We find all the tweets that have the keyword and that are being sent out. Then we take them and we see what’s happening chronologically. We organize these in a timeline-like view, so it’s very easy to follow. Then we show you the most relevant tweets, which can be anything from news organizations to celebrities to politicians and government agencies. All of these are considered to be authoritative sources of information. We look at who is tweeting it, and we put that in the timeline, as well. We then give you the ability to see the retweets and replies on a particular topic.
How do trends end up trending?
We are constantly scanning Twitter for what’s being tweeted about, which keywords are being used most often, who is tweeting about them, and what is going viral. We want to ensure that the information you see is not only recent content, but also what people are interested in and talking about.
Who decides which trends get summarized?
That’s me, working with a team of curators who are all full-time employees at Twitter. We work on other products around this area. In the case of trending topics, we are really focused on telling you what’s happening in the world right now. We go through a few different filters. One is the topic. We look at key words and phrases in order to see what people are really interested in and talking about nowadays. The other filter is the volume or frequency of tweets around that topic. We take those key words and see how many times they’re being used, which can give us a sense of its contagiousness, or how quickly it’s spreading through Twitter. We are looking at things that are happening right now, and we’re trying to understand how people are talking about it.
Is there a difference between measured topics and unmeasured topics?
We do a lot of research into what Twitter users are talking about. Our tips in the main app talk about what is trending on Twitter, but also which things you should be following that you might not know about or heard of. We look into things that are trending in the news. Then we look at other topics that our users are talking about in the comments, which we aggregate for each topic, and again try to get a sense of what’s happening. We also look into user-generated content on Twitter such as Tweets from celebrities, politicians and government agencies about issues. We understand those topics can be controversial and will have a lot of action on Twitter.