‘We do not shadowban’: Twitter fact-checks a Trump tweet

“As we have said before, we do not ‘shadowban,'” a company spokesperson said in a statement just one day after accusations that social media firms were employing the tactic against conservatives gained new life with a report from Vice. The news outlet said Republican lawmakers’ pages weren’t appearing in automatically-populated search fields while those of Democrats were.

That prompted a furious early-morning response from Trump, who has 53 million followers on the platform and regularly shares his unvarnished opinions with them. “We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once,” he promised.

Twitter, while acknowledging a glitch that it said would be addressed in a system update, pointed out that the accounts and pages described by Vice did show up in search results when users manually typed their queries into its search engine.

“To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgments based on political views or the substance of tweets,” the spokesperson said.

Conservatives’ complaints about social media bias began in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as the firms worked to weed out false content following criticism that misleading posts and phony news articles were placed on their platforms by Russian agents seeking to influence the race in which Trump won an unexpected victory against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Video bloggers Diamond and Silk, whose real names are Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, were among the most outspoken of the users to claim they had been erroneously targeted.

The sisters, who built a brand as black women supporting Trump, appeared at a Judiciary Committee hearing in April — one of several on the matter — where they hammered Facebook for censorship.

While Facebook later said it mishandled their concerns, the platform — along with Twitter and YouTube — reported that its content-monitoring efforts had uncovered numerous accounts tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked digital propaganda group, as November midterm elections draw closer.

Twitter alone is flagging 9.9 million accounts a week for suspicious activity, a fourfold increase from the same time a year ago, Nick Pickles, a senior strategist for public policy at the company, told the House Judiciary Committee in a mid-July hearing.

While Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied reports from U.S. intelligence agencies that his government meddled in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf, he conceded earlier this month that he wanted the New York real estate developer to win.

When Facebook reported quarterly earnings a week after Putin’s comments, top executives assured investors that the company is prepared to protect users from election interference in the U.S. this fall, using safeguards that have proved effective during post-2016 campaigns in Germany, France, and the state of Alabama.

None of the methods the platforms are employing is intended to target conservative voices, representatives said during this month’s Judiciary hearing.

Twitter’s approach “requires us to define and act upon bad conduct, not a specific type of speech,” Pickles told lawmakers. “Our purpose is to serve the conversation, not to make value judgments on personal beliefs.”

Despite Congress’s interest in the bias claims, numerous lawmakers have noted that censorship on the platforms wouldn’t be illegal: The Constitution prohibits the U.S. government from interfering with free speech, but it doesn’t place similar restrictions on private companies.

“Private companies can do whatever they want with speech,” Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., said Thursday. “What would be illegal is government regulating speech content or speech algorithms.”