• NPR, Thursday, December 8, 2011 12:12 PM

Want to game the system that Twitter’s trending algorithm uses to pick topics? Then shoot for bursts of activity rather than a gradual increase, Twitter spokesman Matt Graves tells NPR. Twitter's secret algorithm sorts through 250 million tweets a day, and is designed to search for the sudden appearance of a topic in large volume, according to Graves.

"We look at trending topics as a reflection of what people are talking about more right now in this moment, than they were a minute ago, an hour ago or a day ago," he says. In some ways, Twitter's algorithms act like human news editors who are more interested in the latest news than an ongoing story, according to Tarleton Gillespie, a communications professor at Cornell University.

"It's going to be hard for us to think about the involvement of the algorithm in a way that we could understand the involvement of an editor ... [who] might step in and say, 'I don't want to run this story' or 'I think this one's more important than that one,' " Gillespie tells NPR. "What does it mean that an algorithm decided that something was more important than something else?"

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