We've built an algorithm that finds the Tweets that have caught the attention of other users. Top Tweets will refresh automatically and are surfaced for popularly-retweeted subjects based on this algorithm. We do not hand-select Top Tweets.
I'd imagine that the algorithm uses a wide variety of factors but all would be based around popularity, I'd suspect the below to be important:
- The level of recent interaction. How much has that tweet been retweeted etc.
- How many followers the account has
- How active the account is
- How often other accounts have interacted that account previously, previous retweets etc.
- How long the accounts been active