Twitter appears to have made a cautious, nearly inconsequential step towards deprecating search results for alt-right conspiracy theorists. From Gizmodo:
In what appears to be new ranking behavior, Gizmodo has identified several prominent far-right accounts now buried by Twitter’s search feature.
The accounts—which belong to figures like Unite The Right organizer Jason Kessler and white nationalist Richard Spencer—no longer appear in the social platform’s dropdown results, when searching either for their display names or @ handles.
“Search all” on desktop, and sorting by “People” after a search on mobile still generate the expected results, but Twitter seems to intend to reduce the ease with which these personalities can grow their followings. The move follows Twitter’s plans to limit the reach of “troll-like behavior,” announced in May.
From some reason, Alex Jones, who has caused a great deal of misery by falsely claiming that Sandy Hook was a hoax designed to outlaw gun ownership. still shows up in the search results.
Image of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: Joi Ito/Wikipedia. Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)