Typing “racist” into Twitter’s people search yielded US President Donald Trump as the first suggested account on Wednesday, the British news outlet The Independent first reported.
Although the social media platform has not made any statements regarding the development, it’s speculated that many of Trump’s critics are labeling him as a racist given the current political climate in the US following the recent killing of unarmed African-American man George Floyd.
In a statement to AFP, Greg Sterling, a contributing editor at the website Search Engine Land, said the Twitter search result may indicate that “so many people are using the words ‘racist’ or ‘racism’ to respond to or describe Donald Trump, or there’s a concerted effort to associate Trump’s account with those terms.”
However, it’s also possible that many Trump supporters trying to defend the president from accusations of racism may also be using the term “racist” in their replies.
The analyst also pointed out that in 2007, so-called “Google bombing” was used to manipulate Google search results so that then-US President George W. Bush was directly linked to the term “miserable failure.”
According to WordStream, Google bombing is “aimed at increasing a webpage’s rank for a specific Google search by exploiting its algorithm. Google bombing generally involves artificially inflating the number of pages that link to a page and the words used in the link’s anchor text.”
“The platforms have gone out of their way to avoid any appearance of bias,” she added.
Tensions between Twitter and Trump have been high in recent weeks. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has defended his platform’s recent decision to fact-check Trump’s tweets ahead of the US elections in November. Trump, in response, signed an executive order last week intended to weaken a law that prevents people from suing social media platforms over content posted by their users.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
