Twitter, Trending Topics, and Information Manipulation.

So today there was a bit of a tempest on Twitter. You may or may not have noticed, a lot of it depended on who's in your follow list, and whether or not you pay any attention to the trending topics list on the side of the page. Let's start with a short time line so that some things can be put into perspective.

This morning: A reverend with a large church and a lot of young followers posted the old "No God, No Peace, Know God, Know Peace." It gets retweeted alot, but due to the way that trending topics are created, it showed up on the list as "No God".

Mid afternoon: No God shows up on the trending topics side, and is pretty immediately grabbed by atheists and non-religionists and run with.

Evening: No God becomes the number one trending topic, with a huge chunk of the hits having no positive reference to any deity. Clearly this upsets some people because ...

All of a sudden, No God went from being #1 on the trending topics to not being there at all. Whatsoever.  It was just gone. But manually searching for it (along with other trending topics) showed that it was stil getting more hits than any other topic on the TT list.

Night: The 'Know God' trending topic starts rising up. Many a fundie starts cheering at their side 'winning' (and probably still are) but those in the know (or who simply understand how to look at links) see that the Know God TT link now brings up both Know God and No God mentions. Research showed that at no time, did the words Know God show up more often than No God.
Don't believe me?
Click here.
The point at which the 'No God' TT was taken off the list is pretty damn obvious.

"So what? You can still search for it!" you might say, but see.. I'm an Information Professional and the thing is that I know that that is really kind of a crock. Some people say that he who controls the money controls the world. Some that it's whoever controls the weapons. But the real answer to who controls the world is.. the one who controls the information. Because if you control the information, you control what people know, you control how they see and react to the world, and that in the end controls the world as e know it.

In our internet driven world, one of the most effective and insidious ways to control information is by controlling search terms. We use them every day without thinking about them, and the average joe on the street doesn't even realize how what they are finding is being controlled. A couple of recent examples-
A health database that was in part funded by the US government made 'abortion' a stop word. This means that if someone went to this database and entered abortion as a search term... they got back no results. Nothing would say that there were results that were legitimately available, you would just see that there were no articles that matched your search term. Luckily this change was caught and a cafuffle was made by librarians and other information professionals, and the database returned 'abortion' to the search terms.
Recently Amazon caused quite an uproar (amusingly, on Twitter) over the re-organizing of a number of books in their catalog so that they would not show in sales rankings.. and since sales rankings are a primary way that search results are displayed, the end result was that books about homosexuality from an anti-glbt view showed first, while those that were pro- or even just tolerant showed further down the list if at all.
In the end, other than giving a group that already has a culturally-based feeling of superiority yet more reason to crow and puff, this Twitter issue isn't going to do much. But what has to continue from here is the awareness as to what's going on, and why, and how. Because if you never know something is there, then it isn't. A lot can be hidden in the spaces you don't see.