2023/04/08 by Joseph Schlessinger, Kiran Garimella, Schlessinger, Joseph +5
Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Digital Marketing and Social Media #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) #Social Media and Politics #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2304.05382
openalex publication_date 2023/04/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In addition to more personalized content feeds, some leading social media platforms give a prominent role to content that is more widely popular. On Twitter, "trending topics" identify popular topics of conversation on the platform, thereby promoting popular content which users might not have otherwise seen through their network. Hence, "trending topics" potentially play important roles in influencing the topics users engage with on a particular day. Using two carefully constructed data sets from India and Turkey, we study the effects of a hashtag appearing on the trending topics page on the number of tweets produced with that hashtag. We specifically aim to answer the question: How many new tweeting using that hashtag appear because a hashtag is labeled as trending? We distinguish the effects of the trending topics page from network exposure and find there is a statistically significant, but modest, return to a hashtag being featured on trending topics. Analysis of the types of users impacted by trending topics shows that the feature helps less popular and new users to discover and spread content outside their network, which they otherwise might not have been able to do.