thousands of posts doesn’t always mean thousands of people are interestedThe “trending topics” feature has long been a cornerstone of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and attempts to manipulate this feature are a longstanding tradition that remains alive and well today. For example, the cryptocurrency token $GTAI appears to have recently trended almost entirely due to a large number of short posts containing a handful of entirely random words. Although these spam posts could have easily been made to appear more legitimate by using a large language model to generate text composed of complete sentences, the individuals behind this particular spam operation opted for a lower-tech approach for reasons unknown.Important caveat: the list of trending topics displayed by the X/Twitter trending algorithm is tailored to each individual user, so you almost certainly won’t see the exact same list of trends as I do at any given time, even if we connect to X from the same country and use the same language. The $GTAI trending topic discussed in this article was shown to me on a small account that I do not post on and primarily use to study spam, and this usage pattern may have influenced the algorithmic decision to show me this particular trend.you haven’t lived until you typecase nontaxableness antenarial futilely screencraft unexpectable$GTAI trended on X on March 7th, 2024. Scrolling through reverse chronological search results for the topic revealed an almost endless stream of nonsensical posts, with $GTAI invariably positioned at the…Trending topics and word salad