  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.
