Who Exactly is Contributing to "Bieber" Overload?
#TalkNerdytoMeLover's According to Adam
If you're on Twitter, and you use the web interface, then at some point in recent months you've probably asked yourself, "who or what is 'Justin Bieber'?"
Well, that's not what I'm here to answer. Use Wikipedia for that.
No, I'm here to try and answer the other question regarding Justin Bieber, the one that gets asked right after "who or what is Justin Bieber".
That question: "how the hell is Justin Bieber ALWAYS trending?"
To start, the image you see here, and the default option when you log into Twitter is the "Worldwide" trending list. This is all Twitter users across the world. However, Twitter now offers 21 local trending lists, including six countries and 15 cities.
Looking at these 21 locations (at 8:00 PM EDT on April 5, 2010), I couldn't find a single location where Justin Bieber was among the Top 10 trending topics. Meanwhile Jason Heyward (the baseball phenom who hit a home run in his first major league at-bat) was trending in at least six different locations but wasn't trending world wide.
This, now, has me more baffled than ever. I'm well aware that the Twitter location trending doesn't cover the entire userbase, but we've got New York, LA, Seattle and San Francisco covered, and those are some of the most Twitter-heavy populations in the world. Plus, Bieber's home nation of Canada has its own location trends, and at the time I checked, he wasn't even trending there (but Heyward was!).
From here, I knew I had to go further... go down... into the crevasse... I changed my trending location back to Worldwide and clicked on "Justin Bieber". I randomly clicked on a handful of Twitter users who were tweeting about Justin. At least half of them had something Bieber-related typed into their location field on their profile, which probably isn't helping trend tracking (I'd venture to guess that these same people haven't enabled location tracking on their accounts either).
There are also a STUNNING amount of Bieber-related tweet-bots. At least 1 in every 4 Bieber-related tweets that I saw came from a news bot or a retweet bot. There's also a good portion of these tweets that are simply people retweeting everything Bieber himself tweets, with pithy commentary like "OMG!" or "I LOVE JUSTIN!".
I'm not sure if Twitter can do anything about this, or even if the company should. Still, as long as Bieber-mania continues, the trending topics aren't really going to be a "snapshot of what's happening in the world." At least, not until we get Jason Heyward trending Worldwide. I hate the Braves, but I'm willing to put that aside to make it happen. Heyward forever! Bieber never!
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