Donald Trump appears in the first result of the accounts suggested by typing the word “racist” in the Twitter search. The result of an algorithm that should not arrange the already tense relations between the american president and the platform.
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The british newspaper The Independent is the first on Wednesday to have raised this curiosity in a context of widespread protests across the United States against racism and police violence. “If an account is regularly associated with some terms, they may emerge together in the recommendations by using an algorithm”, has just explained a spokesman for Twitter.
The social network has for the first time on may 26, reported a tweet from Donald Trump as misleading, before pinning another three days later for “glorification of violence”. The republican president, followed by addition of 80 million people on the platform, responded in the meantime signed a decree aimed at limiting the judicial protection of social networks.
A possible “concerted effort to associate the account of Trump in these terms”
To Greg Sterling, editor of the website specialized in the search engines Search Engine Land, the fact that Donald Trump is suggested first by looking for “racist” on Twitter is not a new episode of this open conflict. But rather the reflection of a “large number of people using the words ‘racist’ or ‘racism’ to describe or respond” to the president; or the result of a “concerted effort to associate the account of Trump in these terms”. The algorithm of Twitter, explains the specialist, uses a whole bunch of variables, putting it in principle, the platform be free of any attempt of manipulation.
It’s also supposed to be the case of Google, yet a victim in 2003 a maneuver called “bombing” to appear, while at the top the name of the former president George W. Bush, in seeking the expression “fail miserable”. Only a detailed analysis would explicitly make the light on the mechanisms involving Donald Trump and racism, note Kjerstin Thorson, a teacher from the university of Michigan specializing in the political and social networks. “The platforms have made a lot of effort to avoid giving the slightest impression of bias,” she said.
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