ESports - A trending topic on Twitter
In August, Twitter revealed interesting insides on gaming and eSports. During the first half of 2020, conversations about gaming became very popular on Twitter, with over one billion tweets. Especially Japan, the US, and South Korea were tweeting about, for example, Animal Crossing or the new PlayStation 5. Since „Topics“ were launched in November 2019, it is easier to track and keep up with topic-related conversations such as gaming. The most trending Gaming topics were gaming and esports in general, followed by Animal Crossing, Call of Duty, PlayStation, and Fortnite.
To not entirely cancel gaming events in 2020, most of the organizers held digital versions in June and July, which led to an increase in gaming conversations. Especially showcases of the new PlayStation 5 and Xbox games were trending topics. Most Twitter users tweeted about Spiderman: Miles Morales, Horizon Forbidden West, and Gran Turismo 7 for the PlayStation 5. Console producers showcased new products, as well as EA and Ubisoft showed their fans upcoming titles such as FarCry 6, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, or FIFA 21. The next major event to be held as a digital version is Gamescom. Throughout the rest of this year, several gaming- and esports events will occur online and will be closed out with The Game Awards.
New conversation settings are getting tested to give the user more control. This means that they can decide who can reply to their tweets, but other people still can see, retweet and like them. By implementing these settings, Twitter users should feel safer and have a more meaningful exchange in their tweets. Some early feedback confirms this assumption as people feel more protected from spam and abuse. Since introducing this feature, less unwanted Direct Messages and comments were reported by the users, which led to fewer blocking or muting. Most of the tweets with comment restrictions were about topics like Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, or political issues since the users feel more protected against hateful comments. Currently, Twitter is working on a simple solution to find an entire discussion through Retweets to allow its users to have different perspectives. They are also working on inviting people to a conversation after it started while using those settings.
Thanks to social media, it has never been easier to connect with and directly speak to public officials. However, it is essential to provide objective information, increase transparency, and accountability so people can make decisions based on them. Therefore, Twitter banned all state-backed media and political advertising back in 2019 and now labels certain kinds of accounts. With these labels, Twitter wants, amongst other things, to set specific discussions into a context to help foreign users understand the connection between different political accounts. Therefore, Accounts of key government officials and state-affiliated media entities are now explicitly labeled. At the moment, these labels will only be applied in China, France, the Russian Federation, the UK, and the US to test them before expanding this feature worldwide. However, only institutional accounts will get labeled, not personal accounts of heads of states.
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