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Twitter will pin tweets to explain trending topics

Twitter wants to explain why seemingly random words and phrases become trends.

Twitter

Twitter is trying to make its trending topics easier to understand. The company will soon add pinned to tweets and descriptions to some of its trends in an effort to explain how and why trending topics become trends.

“Starting today, some trends will have a representative Tweet pinned to them to give you more insight about a trend right away,” Twitter writes in a blog post. The company won’t be adding the extra context to every trending topic, many of which are relatively self-explanatory. But the change is meant to make it more clear why interest in a given topic is surging, without the need to click through and wade through a stream of tweets. The pinned tweets will be chosen both by Twitter’s human curators, who also create Moments, and its algorithms.

The pinned tweets are rolling out to Twitter’s apps now, and will come to twitter.com “soon,” according to the company.

In cases when a single tweet isn’t enough to explain a trend, Twitter is also working on a change that would add “brief descriptions” to some of its trending topics. According to Twitter, “descriptions will provide straightforward, clearly sourced context around why something is trending,” and will be written by its curation team. Descriptions will be rolling out in “the coming weeks.”