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Donald Trump Jr. made the claim early Sunday morning that Twitter was "allowing" #TrumpBodyCount to trend but not #ClintonBodyCount (which did trend briefly Saturday morning, prior to #TrumpBodyCount.)
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@ZellaQuixote #ClintonBodyCount did indeed generate more traffic than #TrumpBodyCount (268783 tweets vs 153176 tweets between the news of Epstein's death and Junior's tweet.) How does the trending algorithm actually work?
@ZellaQuixote Twitter hasn't published the math that determines what trends, but they make it clear that it's based on a topic experiencing a short-term INCREASE in volume, rather than overall volume. (This makes sense - otherwise mundane topics that come up every day would always trend.)
@ZellaQuixote Based on this, we compared the relative performance of the two hashtags based on increase in volume, and by this metric it makes sense that #TrumpBodyCount would have trended longer than #ClintonBodyCount, despite the latter getting a head start and having more overall volume.
@ZellaQuixote This also provides a possible explanation for why #MAGA accounts believe that they're being unfairly censored by Twitter. As we've observed, right-wing hashtags tend to take off far more quickly than left-wing hashtags, resulting in a shorter timespan in which the hashtag trends.
