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Following the company wide lay offs at Twitter recently, the trending topics in Japan have shifted away from politics to things like anime and games.
Japanese Twitter users have noticed the shift towards pop-culture topics such as Mobile Suit Gundam and Sword Art Online after the lay offs occurred at Twitter, which included the curation team.
Journalist Akio Hoshi covered the news of the removal of the curation team from Twitter, to which Ikeko Takeshita commented on the fact that Twitter Moments created by other journalists would be promoted alongside Twitter’s trending topics.
This has prompted other Japanese Twitter users to point out the potential collusion between the Japanese media and Twitter’s former curation team.
What’s especially interesting in all this, is that despite the curation team’s previous efforts to whip up a political fervour in Japan, it ultimately resulted in very little change in the platform’s actual ndiscourse.
With many Japanese Twitter users stating that the trending topics now look more “peaceful”.
Much of this resilience to political activism is probably down to the more fundamental cultural aspect where harmony is valued above all else in Japan.
The concept of “wa” is hugely important in Japanese culture and has no doubt been the main reason why overtly polemical political discourse has been generally thwarted on Twitter.
However, the more transparent change to trending topics has definitely been welcomed and it will be interesting to see what other changes to Twitter will occur in Japan over the coming weeks and months.
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