Twitter to add brief description to trending topics

San Francisco, Sep 2 (IANS) In a bid to fight misinformation on its platform, Twitter has announced to add pinned Tweets and descriptions on trends to help explain why something is trending on its platform.

In the coming weeks, Twitter users would see brief descriptions added to some trends as well to help add context to the trending topics.

“Descriptions will provide straightforward, clearly sourced context around why something is trending,” the micro-blogging platform said in a blog post on Tuesday.

“Starting today, some trends will have a representative Tweet pinned to them to give you more insight about a trend right away”.

Descriptions are developed by Twitter curation team and follow guidelines, the company said.

Descriptions on trends will be available on twitter.com and Twitter for iOS and Android.

According to the company, a combination of algorithms and the curation team determine if a Tweet represents a trend by evaluating if the Tweet is very reflective of the trend and popular.

“Our algorithms are designed to identify representative Tweets that aren’t potentially abusive, spam, or posted by accounts trying to take advantage of our system,” Twitter said.

Representative Tweets and descriptions on trends will be available in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Egypt, France, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.

People tweeted half a million times over the last year to understand why a certain topic was trending.

“To be clear, we know there is more work to do to improve trends and the context updates we’re announcing today are just a small step in the right direction,” Twitter said.

–IANS

na/