trends

From IndieWeb


Trends is a feature on social media silos that shows the some of the most popular hashtags (AKA Trending hashtags), links, news articles, words, or phrases that are being used or cited in posts, and have been criticized on Facebook & Twitter for being manipulated by bots and/or showing conspiracy theories at the top.

IndieWeb Examples

Aaron Parecki

Aaron Parecki shows a list of "top posts" on monthly archive pages. The posts are ranked by a combination of reposts, likes and replies.

Silo Examples

Facebook

(stub) Facebook

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  • Facebook trends show that Elon Musk has deleted Facebook pages for SpaceX and Tesla

Twitter

(stub) Twitter

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Criticism

State Level Actor Manipulation

Facebook and Twitter have been criticized for not recognizing or identifying when trending hashtags may be the result of bot accounts run by state level actors (e.g. Russia) artificially inflating the popularity of particular politically motivated hashtags.

Showing Conspiracy Theories First

Facebook has been criticized for showing conspiracy theories at the top of their "People Are Saying" for news articles in their Trending News section.

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Brainstorming

Things you could include on an IndieWeb site's "trending" page:

  • Recent posts with a lot of responses
  • List of recently/frequently used tags or keywords


See Also