Gundam and other entertainment have replaced politics on Japanese Twitter Trends after new owner Elon Musk laid off thousands of employees at the company.
The layoffs included the Twitter Curation team, which at least one Japanese journalist has attributed this change from politics to entertainment on the team’s dissolution.
Business Insider Japan writer Ikeko Takeshita explained that normally her and her colleagues create content to be pushed to Twitter and that the curation team would ensure a “Moment” is created.
These Moments are featured alongside Twitter Trends to highlight current events and news coverage:
確かにTwitterのニュースフィードは更新されてない気がする。私たちメディアは自社記事のモーメントを作成→Twitterキュレーションチームに連絡→審査の上ピックされたりされなかったり、という手順を踏んできたのだけど、この作業はしばらくは意味を成さないのかな？
I’m pretty sure Twitter’s news feed isn’t updated. We media created a moment for our own article → , contacted the Twitter curation team → , and it may or may not have been selected after screening, but this work has made sense for a while. I wonder if there isn’t?
In response to this tweet, one user pointed out that Takeshita’s complaints could be considered an admission of “collusion between management and specific media”.
Users appear to consider the new trending list as more authentic than the politics-infused list allegedly curated by Twitter, which is a fair assumption. It’s safe to say that Mobile Suit Gundam The Witch from Mercury is probably more interesting than local politics.
A list of recent Japanese trends can be found below which includes things like Gundam, J-Pop, and anime series. Of course, gaming is one of them. In particular, new casinos, or in Japanese, (# オンカジ 新しい) have been attracting a lot of attention recently. Japanese users have compared this list to previous days where almost all trending topics were political in nature.
The user who posted the list called the new trends “peaceful” and joked about how the curation team must have spend their time “sorting out topics like this every day”.
While some journalists are confused by the way Twitter is operating now, it’s unclear if the removal of the Twitter Curation team is the cause of the issue.
According to the team’s official site, the group was only in charge of “contextualizing” Trends; though the group does admit to curating Moments.
This change may have already made it’s way to the west as well, at the time of writing (it’s Election Day in the US) #GodofWarRagnarok is currently more popular than #ElectionNight.
This is Niche Gamer Tech. In this column, we regularly cover tech and things related to the tech industry. Please leave feedback and let us know if there’s tech or a story you want us to cover!
