New Poll: Should Twitter moderate Trending Tropics to prevent it from being spammed?
For the second time in a month, offensive terms have made it on to Twitter Trending Topics. In both cases, Twitter didn’t remove the offensive terms until after they spent some time at the top of Trending Topics. This time, the attack appears to have been carried out by the infamous 4chan group. ReadWriteWeb asks a legitimate question: Maybe Twitter Trends Shouldn’t Be Entirely Automated?
From the ReadWriteWeb post:
“At the end of the day, we agree with Twitter’s decision to pull the obviously forced hashtag from the trends section just as they did the last time a bunch of folks thought they would have some fun by tweeting other offensive words and phrases. But these incidents have made us wonder: has Twitter trends outlived its ability to function properly as an entirely algorithm-based service? Given how many people rely on Twitter trends to track hot topics and breaking news, the section will be under constant attack from those who want to use the algorithm for their own purposes…and not necessarily good ones.
In some cases, like the latest 4chan move, the term-made-trend will be a somewhat offensive, but ultimately harmless prank. In other cases, the trends will be courtesy of some marketer pushing their hashtag up through the ranks thanks to their latest “tweet-to-win” contest. But do either of these cases represent an organic news-based trend that deserves the spotlight? Perhaps not.”
If Twitter takes this approach, there’s no doubt that they will take heat for filtering out terms that are in a gray area. In fact, those accusations have already started.
So what do you think? I’ve set up a new TwtPoll asking: Should Twitter moderate Trending Tropics to prevent it from being spammed? Click here to take the poll or view the results.
Update:
- OK, It’s been several hours and there are only 8 votes! If you have an opinion about this please take the poll. Click here to share the poll with your Twitter followers.
- 8:12 pm PST: We’re up to 22 votes on the poll.
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August 6, 2009 at 9:04 am
[...] Almost any online service can be overrun by spam and Twitter is proving to be a lucrative field for ...