Jul 26, 2018 - Technology

Trump threatens to investigate Twitter over alleged "shadow banning"

President Trump slammed Twitter's alleged practice of "shadow banning" conservative voices in a Thursday morning tweet:

"Twitter 'SHADOW BANNING' prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints."

The big picture: Some prominent conservatives, like Donald Trump Jr.'s spokesperson and RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, no longer appeared in the automated drop-down portion of Twitter's search bar, Vice News reported yesterday. Kayvon Beykpour, the company's product lead, responded that the issue was a side effect of Twitter's use of machine learning to enact a new policy to "reduce people’s ability to detract from healthy public conversation" — an issue highlighted by New York magazine — and that it was issuing a fix.

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