Opinion: Is Twitter’s Trending Tab Just One Big Lie? Absolutely
Twitter is one of the most well-known and as of recent controversial social media platforms around, however its popularity might be a bit over exaggerated when it comes to pop culture. So is the trending tap on twitter straight up lying to you?
Youtuber and theory enthusiast Matthew Patrick also known as MatPat online runs a successful channel on the media platform called Film Theory in which he discusses possible theories on as you may have guessed movies, television shows and more. One video posted earlier this month caught my attention. Tilted “Twitter’s Toxic Relationship with Movies.” in which Mat discusses how Twitter’s trending actually works for example Avatar: The Way of Water is the upcoming sequel to one of the most successful movies to this day and yet as Mat pointed out its attention on social media has been very underwhelming to borderline nonexistent.
On December 16, experience the motion picture event of a generation.
— Avatar (@officialavatar) November 22, 2022
Watch the brand-new trailer and experience #AvatarTheWayOfWater in 3D. Get tickets now: https://t.co/9NiFEIpZTE pic.twitter.com/UitjdL3kXr
Now you could say that it’s possible that the general public just isn’t interested in the film. We know that’s not true however, based of public data gathered as Avatar 2 is going strong in terms of attention and popularity. So why is there a discrepancy? The answer being that what is viral online doesn’t accurately represent what’s popular and this all leads to Twitter. As it turns out Twitter is one of the smallest social media platforms with only 396 million active users. Compared to say TikTok or Facebook whose userbase is in the billions. Even smaller is the amount of Twitter users are responsible for most of the tweets we see as a study from SocialMediaToday found that only 25% of users are responsible for a massive majority of tweets.
With that in mind MatPat makes a valid point that what’s being talked about online isn’t what’s actually popular. This is a look behind the smoke and mirrors on the social media platform as despite being so small we’ve seen Twitter play a massive part in changing films, like it did with the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie. So, in a way the trending tab for entertainment is just wrong in some cases, but it still has the capability to make big changes.