Micro blogging website Twitter is facing an increasingly loud chorus of questions from those concerned that the moral fabric of the organisation may be under attack, or at very least compromised.

Reason - WikiLeaks.

It has to be said that without a doubt the Hashtag #WikiLeaks and general chatter about WikiLeaks and the subsequent drama's unfolding this week would surely have created a trending topic.

There has been much discussion, even on twitter about why WikiLeaks is not featuring, creating even more reasons why one would expect it to be a trending topic. The buzz about WikiLeaks on twitter especially has been quite significant.

Twitter has responded by releasing a statement on it's blog about the topic of trending in an effort to clear up the controversy. However reading the article (it is posted after the read more) I have to say I am even more confused.

It seems that trending topics are really about things that are getting folks talking on twitter, rather it is about novelty over popularity.

"Twitter Trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that attempts to identify topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously. The Trends list is designed to help people discover the 'most breaking' breaking news from across the world, in real-time. The Trends list captures the hottest emerging topics, not just what’s most popular. Put another way, Twitter favors novelty over popularity"

So it seems that if there is an enormous amount of chatter on twitter about a topic then this background noise is actually counter productive to the trending list. This makes little sense.

Yet according to data pulled from Trendistic (via blogger Bubbloy), WikiLeaks discussion has spiked significantly as of late, and yet #WikiLeaks has not trended since August 26.

The blog as linked is really very good and goes along way to explaining one persons one tests into the theory that twitter has been actively censoring the hashtag #WikiLeaks to keep it off the trending topics list. It is far to comprehensive to summarise or paraphrase, but having spent some time reading it one comes to the conclusions that something is truely amiss in the world of Twitters Algorythm. From his blog:

"The only plausible scenario I can imagine where #Wikileaks does not trend in the top 10 with that sort of behavior is if the other members of the top 10 exhibit even more astounding rises and falls. However, that doesn’t seem to be what’s happened.
Therefore, I am forced to a similar conclusion as Student Activist. It might well be that #Wikileaks is failing to trend simply because of the algorithm failing to pick it up for whatever reason. However, I must say, that would imply that Twitter has written perhaps one of the most abysmal Trend Identification algorithms it could have possibly written. If the goal of the algorithm was to pick up events of importance, popularity or any other meaningful social metric, Twitter would have failed miserably in this aim, and would truly start looking into developing a new one.

Some have pointed to the fact the hash tag #cablegate trended from Nov 28-30 as evidence that no censorship is taking place. #Cablegate roughly tracks the activity of #Wikileaks on Twitter, save for a much small magnitude compared to that of #Wikileaks. Therefore, it is said that the “novelty” of #cablegate in comparison to #wikileaks qualifies it for inclusion by the algorithm. However, after the initial rise, #cablegate evolves in essentially the same way the Inception did during its run, except for the fact that #cablegate stopped trending on Nov 30. #Cablegate having trended does not seem like a structured argument against the existence of censorship. One could easily argue that #cablegate continues to outperform #rappersthatmightbehomeless and experience large fluctuations and that its cessation is indicative of non-algorithmic intervention. Twitter could clear this up by publishing some kind of algorithm analysis or examples of the algorithms performance on sample data or a plausible explanation for the vast difference in how the algorithm acted in handling “Oil Spill” and “Inception” and how it handled “Wikileaks”."

We have also conducted a few simple tests here in The Big Picture Office and noticed the the volume of tweets under the #WikiLeaks tag just flow through at a huge rate compared to other official trending topics at the time Polar Express, which ticked over at a much slower rate.

Here is the official statement from Twitter on the topic:

To Trend or Not to Trend...

Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Since Twitter first introduced the Trends feature in the summer of 2008, one frequently asked question has been “Why isn’t X trending?” This question has come up around a variety of subjects, from #justinbieber and #adamlambert to #flotilla, #iranelection and #demo2010.

This week, people are wondering about WikiLeaks, with some asking if Twitter has blocked #wikileaks, #cablegate or other related topics from appearing in the list of top Trends.

The answer: Absolutely not. In fact, some of these terms, including #wikileaks and #cablegate, have previously trended either worldwide or in specific locations.

Given the widespread confusion about #wikileaks, we’d like to offer a longer explanation of how we measure Trends on Twitter, and why some popular topics may not make the list.

What is a Trend?

Twitter Trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that attempts to identify topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously. The Trends list is designed to help people discover the 'most breaking' breaking news from across the world, in real-time. The Trends list captures the hottest emerging topics, not just what’s most popular. Put another way, Twitter favors novelty over popularity (as BuzzFeed noted in a great article & infographic earlier this week).

What makes a trend a Trend?

Twitter users now send more than 95 million Tweets a day, on just about every topic imaginable. We track the volume of terms mentioned on Twitter on an ongoing basis. Topics break into the Trends list when the volume of Tweets about that topic at a given moment dramatically increases.

Sometimes a topic doesn’t break into the Trends list because its popularity isn’t as widespread as people believe. And, sometimes, popular terms don’t make the Trends list because the velocity of conversation isn’t increasing quickly enough, relative to the baseline level of conversation happening on an average day; this is what happened with #wikileaks this week.

Hope that clears it all up! Well not really twitter.