With more than 20,000 students in the Scottsdale Unified School District, it's difficult to get any one-on-one time with superintendent John Kriekard. That's why the district regularly holds "Coffee with Kriekard," a series of events where parents and community members can show up to hear from the superintendent and ask questions.
For December's event, the district's communications office went big. It harnessed the Twitter accounts for all of its schools, filled with students from kindergarten to 12th grade, to advertise the event. At 1:13 p.m. local time on December 12, all 30 Twitter accounts posted the same tweet, word-for-word, inviting the community to the "Coffee with Kriekard" event the following week and sharing details about the event's location: Coronado High School.
With the majority of the district's Twitter accounts at less than 500 followers, the tweets attracted few likes and little engagement. Nonetheless, the high school's address landed in the personalized trending tab of at least a dozen people (Twitter wouldn't say how many accounts were shown this particular trending topic, but Twitter said the trend was showing for many users for "hours"). While some Twitter users saw it and shrugged, others took to the platform to question why they were seeing the trend — and, of course, share memes and GIFs to express their confusion.
Although it's still not quite clear what happened, it appears that these 30 coordinated tweets allowed the Colorado school district to manipulate Twitter's trends. However, this isn't the first time that this has happened: Accounts and with less innocuous intentions than coffee meetings have been able to "hack" into Twitter trends before to amplify their desired messages and topics, and get them to appear on the home pages of the platform's millions of users.
Now, this latest example of manipulated Twitter trends raises questions about whether the platform has learned from its previous mistakes, and whether it's adequately prepared to deal with bad actors looking to get their messages trending in the future.
Besides myself, two other 20-something Business Insider reporters in New York City said they saw the trend. When Business Insider reached out to some of the other Twitter users who confirmed they noticed the address trending, it was harder to figure out what we had in common. There was no discernible explanation why an address in Arizona was shown to three people in New York; a college student in California studying music composition; three 16-year-olds in Georgia, Illinois, and central Virginia; and an employee at an ad agency in downtown Detroit.