President Trump reacted to allegations of Twitter shadow banning conservatives on Thursday and pledged to “look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once.”
Mr. Trump pledged that the administration would “look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once.”
Twitter “SHADOW BANNING” prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2018
Vice was the first to report on Wednesday that several famous conservatives, including Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesman and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel, were affected by the “shadow banning.”
Shadow banning buries profiles by not including them on their auto-suggestions or searches, without directly banning or restricting their profile.
SEE ALSO: Twitter has placed ‘shadow bans’ on prominent Republicans: Report
Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s head of product, denied that the company targeted conservatives but confirmed that behavioral signals and machine learning were employed to promote “healthy public conversation on Twitter.”
In May, we started using behavioral signals and machine learning to reduce people’s ability to detract from healthy public conversation on Twitter. This approach looks at account behavior & interactions with other accounts that violate our rules. https://t.co/FsLO6NwyNw
— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 25, 2018
On 2) Some accounts weren’t being auto-suggested even when people were searching for their specific name. Our usage of the behavior signals within search was causing this to happen & making search results seem inaccurate. We’re making a change today that will improve this.
— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 25, 2018
Twitter is set to release its second-quarter earnings on Friday.
Senior Analyst at Investing.com Haris Anwar pointed out in a statement that the social media giant is performing well despite its shares being worth half of what they were in 2013.
“One area of concern is about the company’s ability to keep its costs down at a time when it’s aggressively pushing the video strategy,” Mr. Haris said.
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