Twitter censors trend list due to super-injunction?
If you’re concerned about how a few rich celebrities are using super-injunctions to censor the British press then you might find this interesting, intriguing, and worrying…
Firstly a quote from BBC News:
Footballer’s Twitter disclosure order prompts online action
Hundreds of Twitter users have reacted to a footballer’s bid to find out who is putting information about him on the website by posting new messages online.
The player, who an injunction says can only be identified as CTB, is taking action against ex-Big Brother star Imogen Thomas and the Sun newspaper.
He has now obtained a High Court order asking Twitter to reveal details of users who had revealed his identity.
Twitter has not commented but hundreds of users have repeated his name online.
There’s a footballer currently being mentioned a lot on Twitter. His name is Charlie Mulgrew. He’s the top trending name on Twitter right now and he is NOT the person with the super-injunction. People are talking about him because of his performance in today’s Scottish Cup Final. Charlie is being mentioned, on average, a couple of times every minute, which is why he’s on Twitter’s trend list.
Meanwhile another footballer, Ryan Giggs, is being mentioned every few seconds. For some reason his name isn’t showing up on Twitter’s trend list. Which makes me wonder, purely hypothetically, is there some reason why Twitter would be blocking his name from appearing on the list?


about 2 years ago
Love how you’ve kept the first few letters of his name in the picture – not breaking the injunction, but confirming my suspicions!
about 2 years ago
yes I have noticed that – none of the keywords are trending anywhere, atleast from the UK – If somebody knows how to set up a proxy connection a person could see if it is censored out of USA searches, I know google can censor out info, I imagine it would be easy to prevent certain words appearing.
about 1 year ago
Basically, he’s not trending because that’s not how the trending list works. Twitter did a post on this last time they were accused of censorship:
http://blog.twitter.com/2010/12/to-trend-or-not-to-trend.html
The short version: It’s the velocity of increase in mentions which determines if something trends, not the number of mentions.
So, for example, if something is mentioned consistently 50 times per second over a long period of time, it probably won’t trend. But if something goes from (say) 5 mentions per second to 50 over a short period, it will. But in order to stay on the trending list, it would need to continue its velocity, by (say) increasing to 100 mentions/second over the same period.
about 1 year ago
It’s showing if you do UK > Glasgow in the trends, also shows down in some other towns. http://twitpic.com/50rdoj
about 1 year ago
I’m surprised Anonymous hasn’t gone after Twitter over this. Where are the censorship police today?