How Musk let this happen
A few years before Elon Musk acquired the platform then-known as Twitter, the company rolled out a new feature that provided written context for trending topics. The technology powering the written trend descriptions? Humans.
Previously when a story would break, Twitter's algorithms would catch the relevant keywords being posted and share the trend, but it sometimes wouldn't be obvious why a given set of words was trending.
But, in 2020, Twitter put together a team of human editors to curate news and put trends in context. In addition, the top tweets that showed up under a trending topic would no longer just be algorithmically ranked, but include human curation as well. One year later, Twitter partnered with AP and Reuters to further bolster its efforts to provide human-provided context to trending topics.
Shortly after Musk bought the company in October 2022, though, the written context on trending topics disappeared. Musk had laid off Twitter's human editors. As Reuters reported in November 2022, "Twitter's curation team, which was responsible for 'highlighting and contextualizing the best events and stories that unfold on Twitter,' had been axed."