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Twitter wants to help you understand the 'why' behind trends

Pinned tweets will help add context to what's trending in a new Twitter update.

Andrew Gebhart Former senior producer
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Angela Lang/CNET

Apparently, the question "why is this trending?" is tweeted so often that the social media company is taking steps to help provide clarity. Twitter announced via blog post on Tuesday that the company will be adding context to trending topics on the platform through representative tweets and curated descriptions. 

Representative tweets will be pinned to trends and selected via algorithms and curation teams. The system should automatically filter out spam and abusive tweets so that they don't end up as the pinned explanation for the trend. These representative tweets should be live now on the mobile iOS and Android versions of Twitter. Look for them in your browser soon.

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Representative tweets should help explain trends. 

Twitter

The curated descriptions will take a little longer to launch. Twitter estimated we'll start seeing them in the coming weeks. They'll be entirely developed by the curation team and intended to be straightforward and clearly sourced.

Twitter also promised that these steps are just part of the plan to improve trends and add clarity to the social media platform.