If You Trend It, They Will Click

Facebook trending… on Facebook trending pic.twitter.com/ix6oLgvw6y

— Talya Minsberg (@tminsberg) May 9, 2016

Selected quotations from Facebook’s leaked guidelines for its trending module, illustrated.

“I. ASSUME EVERY TOPIC IN PENDING IS A REAL-WORLD EVENT, UNTIL PROVEN OTHERWISE.”

“II. ASSUME THE TOPIC FEED’S QUALITY WILL IMPROVE AFTER THE TOPIC IS ACCEPTED.”

“Hashtags are verbatim phrases that trend. Altering them would be changing the organic composition of the trend. Hashtags are different than topics, which are inherently more subjective because they’ve been generated by the topic tagger (which has its own limitations).”

“Write a custom topic name for breaking or planned news events that are expected to persist for several days.”

“OPTIMIZE FOR THE SQUARE CROP IN THE NULL STATE DISPLAY”

https://giphy.com/gifs/rSW9303l0kAko

“8. Crime — Topics related to alleged, convicted, exonerated crimes, criminal trials, appeals, death penalty. _Acts of war/terrorism should not be filed to crime._”

“Lebron James is in pending before the start of the Cavaliers game, but he hasn’t done anything yet to qualify as a real-world event. We want to put him on a short timer, to make sure we re-review after the real-world event has begun.”

“Having more trends has proven to increase the CTR (click through rate) and participation rate.”