Out of the blue today, Donald Trump took to his favorite medium of Twitter to complain that the company was
Out of the blue today, Donald Trump took to his favorite medium of Twitter to complain that the company was « shadow banning » prominent Republicans — and it wasn’t long before Donald Trump Jr sided with his father.
The allegations stem from a Vice article that suggested Twitter was limiting the visibility of searches for key Republican figures — something Twitter denies. The company says that a bug is to blame and it is actively working on addressing it.
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Vice reported that « the Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel, several conservative Republican congressmen, and Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesman no longer appear in the auto-populated drop-down search box on Twitter », going on to describe this as « shadow banning ». It points out that key Democrats and « not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same situation in Twitter’s search ».
Trump jumped on the article, taking to Twitter to say:
His son soon chimed in to add:
So what’s being going on? Twitter says that it’s not shadow banning here, but what’s been noticed in search suggestions is the result of its « behavioral ranking » system. Twitter’s head of product, Kayvon Beykpour, tweeted to explain:
Twitter also responded by saying:
It seems that the search problem — which is what it was, not shadow banning — came as a result of Twitter’s continuing attempts to crack down on trolls and abuse on its platform. It seems that the Republican accounts highlighted by Vice (although it’s worth noting that the same problem is also likely to have affected non-Republicans… not that Trump would have pointed out as much) were seen as being behaviorally questionable and this may not have been justified. Having been alerted to the issue, Twitter is now working to address it — but that’s unlikely to be enough to quieten down conspiracy theorists.
As Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey noted:
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