If you go to the Twitter settings by tapping the gear at the top right in the mobile app for Android, you will find the possibility to choose to see content related to your location (you can set your city or country), as well as activate the “Trends for you”, which what it does is to show you only the topics of your interest based on the accounts you follow and your location. However, once you have activated this last option, you will not be able to deactivate it, unless you follow the trick mentioned below.
I’ve been using the “Trending for you” feature for the past few months and I’ve realized that it’s not for me. Effectively, the trending section of Twitter will only show you topics that you are interested in, something that is chosen based on your location and the accounts you follow, as Twitter rightly says. The big disadvantage of this is that it will NOT show you other important topics that are happening in your city, country or the world, which is one of the reasons why we all use Twitter.
To give you an example, in my personal Twitter account I follow only soccer and video games topics, and with this feature enabled, in the trends I only get these topics, even though they are not really trending (there are not many people talking about that), so it is just a Twitter filler. This way, important topics that are really trending in our country or location and that would surely interest us, even if we do not follow related accounts, such as national reality issues, e.g. some earthquake or tragedy, some national emergency decree, etc., things that we should be aware of, cannot be shown.
All of the above is solved by disabling the Trending feature for you. If you’re on the Twitter mobile app for Android and you ever turned this feature on, you can’t turn it off. Disabling the switch automatically turns it back on, as you can see in the video above.
To leave it permanently disabled and get back to seeing real trends in your location, you must open the following URL mobile.twitter.com/settings/explore from your mobile browser or PC (log in to your Twitter account if you are not logged in) and uncheck the Trending for you box.