Twitter Refreshes Its Suggested User List for Politics, Sort Of [UPDATED]

On Monday, I blogged about Twitter's new "Who to Follow" feature, and urged the company to update its list of suggested accounts to follow under "Politics." And lo and behold, they've done it. But, as you'll see, important questions still remain unanswered about how the list is constructed and what it is supposed to tell us.

Gone from the top 25 are clunkers like @CarlyforCA (Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina, who had tweeted since last November--she went from #1 to #47, oddly), @RasmussenPoll (Republican pollster Scott Rasmussen--he's now #56 after being #2), @MicheleMalkin (the ultra-right blogger, who went from #5 to #48), and @HouseFloor, an autotweeter that reports every time Congress votes or comes to order, is gone entirely.

@JohnBoehner, the House Speaker, has been pushed from #6 to #47 on the list, an odd decision, if you ask me. @cnnbrk has been pushed from #3 to #60, but now CNN's Candy Crowley (@crowleycnn) is #2 on the recommended list--a sign someone at Twitter realizes that we're more likely to follow real human beings than generic PR accounts. The @aclu account, which was #7 on the old list, and @thenation account, which was #9, are now pretty far down on the list as well.

Replacing them at the top of the list are some accounts that probably belong there, like @WhiteHouse, @SarahPalinUSA, @PressSec (the White House press secretary) and @UN. For some reason, both @NPRpolitics and @NPRnews are high up on the recommended list. And @AlGore, who tweets at the pace of an academic quarterly, has been elevated to #3. Someone, please wake me up the next time he says anything interesting.

But the oddest choice of all is @ShashiTharoor at #1, the person Twitter most thinks you should follow if you are interested in politics. He's a member of India's Parliament, and former UN Under-Secretary General, and quite popular apparently, with nearly a million Twitter followers. Perhaps Twitter thinks a billion Indians deserve some attention? OK, but then why Tharoor? Could it be because he lost his job as a government minister after tweeting about traveling "cattle class" "in solidarity with all our holy cows."

The list is still much heavier on politicos and media personalities than it is on people who actually say interesting things about politics, in my humble opinion (Check out my curated list of TechPolitics tweeters, which isn't ranked in any order, for an alternative window on the news of the day). But if you want to use Twitter just to get a dose of Headline News, the revised list of suggestions will do that for you.

Unfortunately, Twitter has yet to explain how it comes up with any of these recommended users lists, so it's near impossible to judge if the changes made are editorial endorsements (or the opposite), and whether we should take them seriously as indications of the company's political tastes or economic interests, or just the semi-random choices of a low-level staffer. It's high time the company took a more pro-active stance in explaining these moves. Are they meant to be neutral options? If so, by what metric are they derived? Or are they actual favors to friends--and when those people are powerful politicians or media players, doesn't that create an appearance of impropriety?

If Google were to skew search results on a term like "politics" to favor one party or its favorite politicians, we'd be outraged. Yet here is Twitter producing an odd and unexplained list of suggested Politics users, and not a tweep...

UPDATE: Six hours later, I checked the recommendations for politics, and now it's a mishmash of the folks they had previously (Malkin is #1, followed by the HuffPostPol account and John Boehner). I give up. There's no rhyme or reason to this, it seems. Caveat emptor.