In addition to more personalized content feeds, some leading social media platforms give a prominent role to content that is more widely popular. On Twitter, "trending topics" identify popular topics of conversation on the platform, thereby promoting popular content which users might not have otherwise seen through their network. Hence, "trending topics" potentially play important roles in influencing the topics users engage with on a particular day. Using two carefully constructed data sets from India and Turkey, we study the effects of a hashtag appearing on the trending topics page on the number of tweets produced with that hashtag. We specifically aim to answer the question: How many new tweeting using that hashtag appear because a hashtag is labeled as trending? We distinguish the effects of the trending topics page from network exposure and find there is a statistically significant, but modest, return to a hashtag being featured on trending topics. Analysis of the types of users impacted by trending topics shows that the feature helps less popular and new users to discover and spread content outside their network, which they otherwise might not have been able to do.

翻译：除了更具个性化的内容推送外，主流社交媒体平台还赋予广泛流行的内容突出地位。Twitter的"趋势话题"识别平台上流行的讨论话题，从而推广用户通过自身社交网络可能无法看到的流行内容。因此，"趋势话题"可能在影响用户某日参与的话题方面发挥重要作用。通过利用来自印度和土耳其的两个精心构建的数据集，我们研究了话题标签出现在趋势话题页面时对该标签产生的推文数量的影响。我们具体旨在回答：话题标签因被标记为趋势而新增多少条使用该标签的推文？我们将趋势话题页面的影响与网络曝光区分开来，发现话题标签登上趋势话题页面会带来统计学上显著但适度的回报。对受趋势话题影响的用户类型分析表明，该功能帮助不太受欢迎的用户和新用户发现并传播其社交网络之外的内容，否则他们可能无法做到这一点。