Luckily we can spell ‘Oscar’
JOBURG - South Africans follow Oscar's "trail" on Twitter
South Africa and the world looked to the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria as Oscar Pistorius took the stand in his murder case, but South Africans on Twitter weren’t sure whether they were following Oscar’s ‘trial’ or ‘trail’ considering the incorrect hashtag #OscarTrail trended for hours on 7 April.
What exactly makes a topic trend on Twitter anyway?
According to Twitter’s official blog, trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that attempts to identify topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously.
“Topics break into the Trends list when the volume of Tweets about that topic at dramatically increases,” explains the blog. “The Trends list is designed to help people discover the ‘most breaking’ breaking news from across the world, in real-time.”
So around the world, tweeters are seeing that not only is a South African athlete on trial but so too is our spelling.
