Searching Twitter for the term “racist” displays President Donald Trump as the top result in the “people” category. Breitbart News tests confirmed that the president’s account is listed first when searching for “racist” across different browsers, devices, and even in other countries, indicating it isn’t dependent on account interests or settings.
The Independent first reported that typing “racist” into Twitter’s search bar returns President Trump as the first account listed. Although Twitter’s search results are influenced by the user’s browsing habits, searching the same term on anonymous browsers such as Brave and private windows still returned the same results, as did Breitbart News tests in multiple other countries.
The issue was verified by Breitbart News as well as multiple other Twitter users:
Other results in the “People” section include users that have “racist” in their Twitter bios or display names, this includes many Twitter users stating that they’re “anti-racist.”
The Independent states that:
Twitter said that when an account is mentioned often alongside certain terms, the two can be shown together in search recommendations as a result of the way its algorithm works.
Breitbart News reached out to Twitter for comment on the issue but has yet to receive a response at the time of the writing of this article. This is not the first time that the Big Tech Masters of the Universe have used search algorithms to attack President Trump.
In July 2018, Breitbart News reported that searches for “idiot” on Google Images returned pictures of President Trump in the top five results and heavily throughout the rest of the list.
Business Insider stated at the time that this was the result of protestors manipulating Google’s search algorithm. “Protesters are publishing articles on their own platforms which associate the word ‘idiot’ with Trump, as well as sharing and upvoting articles which do the same,” explained Business Insider, adding that the “net effect of this is that the association inside Google’s algorithm becomes stronger, producing photos of Trump when people input the term.”
In December of 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was forced to explain the error before the House Judiciary Committee. Pichai commented on it at the time stating
We provide search today, any time you type in a keyword we — as Google — we crawl, we’ve gone out and crawled and stored billions of copies of billions of pages in our index and we take the keyword and match it against webpages and rank them based on our two hundred signals, things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it and based on that, at any given time we try to rank and find the best results for that query. And then we evaluate them with external raters to make sure — and they evaluate it to objective guidelines — and that’s how we make sure the process is working.
Read more at Breitbart News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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