Strategies and Motivations behind Artificial Trending Topics in Twitter

This paper presents several case studies on how groups cooperate to manipulate Twitter’s Trending Topics to their benefit, creating what we called Artificial Trending Topics. We show evidences that such topics are quite common and discuss some of the strategies used by these groups to reach their goals and their motivations to do so. We further discuss these different types of topics in the context of social capital. Finally, we show how the social networks behind artificial topics are quantitatively different from networks behind organic topics, paving a way for the automatic classification of each type.