I think this guy's comment (who says he works at Twitter on trends) is a valid explanation for this: http://studentactivism.net/2010/12/05/wikileaks-twitter-3/#c...

I'm not so sure it's a giant Twitter/State Department Consipiracy.

i don't think it's a conspiracy -- activists of all political persuasions have been complaining about this general phenomenon for quite a while

it does reveal a lot about Twitter's trending topics algorithm, and the discussions on Student Activism have been quite good

What's trended on Twitter has changed quite a bit over the past few years. It used to be that we could get a random video that we'd make at Podcamp trending in a few hours easily, and now it seems to be flooded by silly populist memes that are rarely intelligent conversation, or any significance, or anything that matters to me. Unfortunately, this is a decent reflection of the real world, where few people actually care about things that matter and don't integrate such things into their daily conversation.

Instead Justin Bieber, #noonelikesyoubecause , #thingsimiss ,and #rappersthatmightbehomeless rule the conversational airwaves.

No conspiracy here at all.

I agree, no conspiracy theories, just changing algorithms for trending topics.Even popular (and issues based) discussions with certain #tags are removed from trending topics after a fixed number of days, no matter how many people are still tweeting about that particular topic, with that particular #tag.So, if you want to keep a topic alive, you need to change the related #tag after that certain time period.

Twitter, don't you do it, don't even think about it.