- Software engineer Brian Feldman created an archive of topics that trended on Twitter this year.
- The project revealed themes of global political unrest alongside memes and pop culture trends.
When writer and software engineer Brian Feldman created an archive of topics that trended on Twitter this year, he set out to capture a snapshot of his experience while using the social media platform — and instead found broad themes that revealed global political unrest, pop culture fads, and a company wrestling with how to best explain why people were talking about it at all.
Initially inspired to catalog Twitter's attempts to describe trending current events, Feldman took screenshots of trending topics each time he logged on to the platform, focusing on those that had a staff-created written description about why the topic was trending.
"I didn't want to try and present some sort of objective tabulation of it because there was no way I was ever going to get there," Feldman told Insider. "I would much rather sort of embrace that. Like, this was my experience checking in on Twitter. And maybe you have a similar experience, maybe you have a different one. But, you can only really sort of see that when someone presents something like this."
The list of 457 different trending topics each highlighted a moment that Twitter showed Feldman users commenting en masse about a singular topic. Included among the recorded phrases were "Goth Clowns," a trending misreading of the words "cloth gowns" seen written on a sign, "Seek the Lord," after Christian users posted prayers referencing Isaiah 55:6, and "Red Lobster," following radio show host Jesse Kelly awarding Rep. Lauren Boebert a Red Lobster gift card for being the "hottest woman in Congress."
"I think generally, when these trends appeared, and when they appeared with a written description, they were either people are like, really happy about something, or something has sparked discussion," Feldman said, noting that most descriptions on Twitter that he observed over the course of the project seemed to avoid using negative language to point out why topics were trending.
"RIP Chester," an entry from July 25 reads, with a description elaborating: "Chester Bennington is being remembered after a clip featuring the late singer interacting with a person with a disability during a performance goes viral"
On August 30, a screenshot shows "Jen Psaki" trended with a description that read: "Joe Rogan comments on former White House press secretary Jen saki (sic) during the latest episode of his The Joe Rogan Experience podcast."
From "Adidas" to "Ted Lasso," the trending topics revealed pop culture fads and memes that moved Twitter users to conversation — and often argument — about their preferences and opinions.
"People like an opportunity to share even like their most mundane and strongly held opinions," Feldman said. "So like, there's one where people were weighing in on what the best ginger ale was."
Political themes were especially prevalent, with topics including "America's Hitler," "Ministry of Truth" and "Dobbs" trending, highlighting tension in US politics with conversations about Donald Trump, theBiden administration's attempt at controlling misinformation on Twitter, and the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, respectively.
Internationally, trends like "Cold War," "Russian Warship," and "Taiwan" also demonstrated how political unrest is being felt around the globe.
Often, political conversations on the platform centralized around media personality who had said something controversial, Feldman noted, adding that the ones that were presented to him were most often conservative, despite not posting about his political views on Twitter.
"The sheer number of conservative media figures or politicians that have sort of captured the attention of the platform was sort of surprising to see in aggregate," Feldman, a former writer for The Washington Post, said. "As someone who used to work in media and still has colleagues who work in there or friends who talk about this stuff, it's easy to get numb to like mentions of Ben Shapiro, or Mitch McConnell, or whoever — but it was interesting to see that like, Twitter just sort of puts their names in front of everyone's face. Constantly."
Ben Shapiro, Madison Cawthorn, Lauren Boebert, and Donald Trump were among the most frequent names, Feldman said, often appearing around conversations about Trump's legal troubles or cultural arguments about issues like gun control, "traditional masculinity," and the infrastructure spending package.
Feldman said that, of particular interest, were the staff-generated descriptions on these topics, which revealed how Twitter employees "wrestled" with curating the automatically created lists. The language used in the descriptions was often met with a sort of forced neutrality, Feldman said, where employees attempted to explain without bias why a particular topic was trending.
"I think that sort of interaction between automated systems and people having to wrestle with them and curate them and get them to be more useful than they might be in a fully automated world is interesting," Feldman said. "Obviously, it's something that we struggle with constantly and probably will forever now."
Twitter has come under recent fire over its content moderation practices since Elon Musk purchased the social company for $44 billion in October, including criticism over rising hate speech, an exodus of influential users and advertisers, and threats of international sanctions. Musk has indicated the platform previously censored conservative perspectives, while experts warn his current approach to content moderation is amplifying right-wing extremism and encouraging domestic terrorists.