Trump is First Result for "Racist" on Twitter

Misbar's investigation shows that as of June 25, 2020, searching for both “racist” and “racism” brings up President’s Trump profile. 

A Twitter spokesperson said that the president is found under these terms because of Twitter’s computerized algorithm, which is created through user posts. They said, "If an account is mentioned often alongside certain terms, it can become algorithmically surfaced together as a recommendation.” This means that if an account is consistently linked to certain terms, then it will appear with those terms. Users posting that President Trump behaves in a racist way, or users posting that he is not racist, would similarly associate his account with the term. 

Although Trump threatened to close down Twitter and other social media sites, he continues to post about it, particularly tweets about police brutality protests in the United States. On Tuesday, June 2, the Center for Democracy and Technology sued President Trump, saying that his executive order seeking to regulate social media violates the First Amendment. On June 5th, Trump tweeted and retweeted 200 posts, the most tweets he has made in a 24-hour period. Twitter recently blocked President Trump’s campaign video tribute to George Floyd, claiming copyright issues. It also recently veiled some of Trump’s tweets as spreading false news or violating the company’s rules about glorifying violence. In particular, it veiled Trump’s problematic tweet calling Black Lives Matter protestors “thugs” and saying that “Any difficulty and we will assume control. When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” This tweet faced extensive backlash for being racist and promoting violence.

However, Trump shows up as the first search result mostly because of other people calling him racist, rather than his own posts, making the claim selective.