Sort of. HP recently released a study looking under the hood of Twitter’s ‘Trending Topics’ function – revealing (gasp) that most of the time, popular topics get broadcast by major media twitter accounts, then amplified by their followers, rather than some wanky cloud-based news system.
What this means, then, is that for the most part Twitter is a medium for breaking news to get out, rather than a source of news tips – for that, old-fashioned journalistic techniques like e-mail and Google still need to be relied upon. 72% of retweeted topics came from the likes of CNN, the New York Times and The Huffington Post.
A comforting revelation is the fact that ‘influencers’ – celebrities with popular accounts, a la Ashton Kutcher, Kanye West and other man-children – don’t have that much of an impact on trending topics.
[HP]
