President accuses Twitter of illegal bias against GOP
Alleged ‘shadow banning’ limits search visibility.
President Donald Trump criticized Twitter on Thursday, accusing the social media company of a “discriminatory and illegal practice” that has resulted in limiting the visibility of prominent Republicans in search results.
Vice News reported Wednesday that, as a result of a technique known as “shadow banning,” Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and several conservative GOP congressmen were no longer appearing in an auto-populated drop-down search box.
“Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good,” Trump wrote. “We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.”
A Twitter spokesman declined to comment Thursday morning on the president’s tweet. The social media company has said that it is aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in the search box and is working to address the issue.
In a tweet Wednesday, Kayvon Beykpour, head of product for Twitter, said that the company was not targeting Republicans and that it is working to alter its usage of “behavior signals” that inform its search results.
“To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgments based on political views or the substance of tweets,” Beykpour wrote.
Vice News reported that Democrats, including some of the party’s most liberal members, were not being “shadow banned” in the same way, according to a review by the publication.
In the wake of the report, McDaniel and other Republicans have castigated Twitter.
“The notion that social media companies would suppress certain political points of view should concern every American,” McDaniel said Wednesday.
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, also weighed in, sending a tweet Wednesday that said: “So now @Twitter is censoring @GOPChairwoman? Enough is enough with this crap.”
The president’s tweet Thursday could create new political headaches for Twitter and its tech peers, which have faced months of accusations — from the highest echelons of the Republican Party — that they are biased against conservatives.
Even though Trump is arguably Twitter’s most prominent user, right-leaning users still contend that they are being unfairly targeted, censored and suspended compared to their liberal counterparts.
The accusations have even made their way into some Republicans’ pitches to voters: California Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who is angling to become speaker of the House next year, has run ads on Facebook that fundraise around allegations of anti-conservative bias on social media.
Twitter has admitted mistakes, even apologizing after an incident in 2017 in which it initially banned a congresswoman from promoting a video that discussed abortion. But the company has stressed that it seeks to apply its policies even-handedly.