‘No. He’ trending on Twitter, Here’s why

Hyderabad: Anything can trend on Twitter. Bizarre memes, celebrity pap photos, and even a basic English phrase. It’s all on what the algorithm picks. On Thursday, ‘No. He’ was on the ‘What’s happening?’ list of the micro-blogging site. By the look of it, one would imagine it to be some sort of a campaign that […]

Hyderabad: Anything can trend on Twitter. Bizarre memes, celebrity pap photos, and even a basic English phrase. It’s all on what the algorithm picks.

On Thursday, ‘No. He’ was on the ‘What’s happening?’ list of the micro-blogging site. By the look of it, one would imagine it to be some sort of a campaign that triggered people to tweet those words repeatedly. But when we clicked on the trend to see what the whole shoo-sha was about, it turned out to be nothing but a gap in twitter’s algorithm.

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Twitter’s trending topic algorithm is built in a way that it picks what everyone is tweeting about, be it a new movie, sports match, or the upcoming elections. Sometimes people may coincidentally tweet a combination of words and that automatically becomes a hot topic like how ‘No.He’ became one. Though it’s just a phrase we use daily, when used collectively, it’s a trend.

Now one may find the functioning of this algorithm weird. For us, trending topics are something note-worthy. Questions will arise – How can something as basic as this become a trending topic? Isn’t this algorithm supposed to be smarter and actually pick news that matters?

How much ever one may crib about it, it is a fact that by leveraging this very algorithm many online campaigns have benefited immensely. Strategic tweeting by a group can make something worth nothing; the country’s most talked about.

The next time you wonder why something is trending, remember that at the end of the day it’s just an algorithm and not an actual human working in a newsroom that would pick and curate content for you.