Trump says he ‘will look into’ Twitter’s alleged ‘shadow banning’ of conservatives
The president also recently said he 'likes the power' of the platform
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Your support makes all the difference.Donald Trump has said the US “will look into” what he thinks is Twitter’s practice of limiting the visibility of conservatives on the platform.
The president tweeted in what has become a regular morning rant: “Twitter “SHADOW BANNING” prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints”.
Mr Trump has used the platform has his main means of communicating with the public and his comment appeared to be a response to a report by Vice News.
The report claimed Twitter was “limiting the visibility of prominent Republicans in search results — a technique known as “shadow banning".
The accounts of Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel, several conservative Congressmen, and the president’s son Donald Trump Jr’s spokesperson were all shadow banned, according to Vice News and the president.
The irony of the president warning the platform is that he recently said he "like[s] the power of it" because it enables him to combat what he perceives as rampant "fake news" from traditional news outlets.
It is also ironic since the Vice News report appears to be inaccurate; Twitter does not actually appear to be shadow banning conservatives.
When a user searches for their names, they do not appear in the convenient, auto-populated search box in top-right corner of the Twitter website.
However, all of them show up in full searches and in followers’ Twitter timelines.
Basically, the platform demoted these users but did not shadow ban them.
They also recently did a large purge of fake accounts - or bots - and several users may have lost a significant amount followers, and thus influence.
Republican House member Matt Gaetz told The Hill newspaper he felt “victimised” by Twitter since his visibility on the platform had “dropped”, the paper reported.
It is unclear how Mr Gaetz was measuring that, however.
What he may have been referring to is Twitter’s purge of fake accounts - often attributed to Russian bots - and what it referred to as “troll-like behaviours” from accounts users had flagged as racist or making threats.
His staffer said they noticed a “significant decrease” in Mr Gaetz’s followers and retweets after the 15 May action.
“As we have said before, we do not 'shadowban'. We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box, and shipping a change to address this,” a Twitter spokesperson said.
“To be clear, our behavioural ranking doesn’t make judgements based on political views or the substance of tweets,” Kayvon Beykpour, a product lead at the company, tweeted a day ahead of Mr Trump’s comment.
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