Twitter Trends Driven Mostly by Mainstream Media

Forget Ashton Kutcher and Lady Gaga. On Twitter, mainstream media outlets such as CNN, the New York Times, and the BBC dominate trending topics.

According to a new report by HP, trending topics are not determined by how many followers a user has or how prolific a tweeter that user is. After studying a sample of 16.32 million tweets during the fall of 2010, researchers discovered that 22 users were the source of most trending topic retweets. (Roughly 31% of tweets about a trending topic are retweets.) Of these 22 influentials, 72% were Twitter accounts run by traditional news organizations, including Reuters and the Washington Post, but other digital-age media outlets such as the Huffington Post were also featured on the top trenders list.