Twitter Search Seemingly Back To Normal After Trump 'Shadow Banning' Tweet

Once again, President Donald Trump used his personal Twitter account to set the tone of online discourse for the day. On Thursday morning, Trump wrote that Twitter was "shadow banning" big-name conservatives on the site, accusing the social network of breaking the law in the process.

In response, Twitter denied shadow banning any users and said it was looking into fixing the issue. A spokesperson for the company did not comment on Trump's tweet, per CNBC.

The president was most likely referring to a Vice News report about Twitter’s alleged burying of right-wing voices on the platform. Vice found that Republicans, like party chair Ronna McDaniel, would not automatically show up in Twitter’s drop-down search menu. According to Trump and some other conservatives, this was tantamount to censorship as the site was effectively hiding their profiles from users.

That is not necessarily true, as hitting the search button or the enter key after typing in Ronna McDaniel’s name would bring users to a more detailed search page that included her account. At no point was her account taken off the site.

Twitter sent out a statement to the press denying that this was an active anti-conservative measure by the social network, according to CNBC. Instead, it was apparently a problem with the search feature that Twitter set about fixing. Vice News reports the search function appeared to be fixed as of Thursday morning.

"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. The profiles, Tweets and discussions about these accounts do appear when you search for them. To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn't make judgments based on political views or the substance of Tweets."

Earlier this week, similar reports emerged that far-right accounts, like that of conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, were suffering the same fate. At the time of writing, Cernovich’s account shows up in the drop-down search menu again. Twitter declined to comment specifically on the matter on Monday but did point International Business Times to a May blog post about the site’s approach to online trolls.

Referring back to Trump’s tweet, nothing about this would be illegal even if Twitter deliberately silenced conservative voices on the site. As a private business, Twitter can grant or revoke access to whoever it wants, as the Washington Post pointed out.