Search Nazi or Racist on Twitter, And Guess Who Comes Up? – by Calvin Freiburger

Last month, TFPP reported that performing a “People” search on Twitter for the word “hitler” yields the Twitter account of President Donald Trump as its very first result, a suspicious phenomenon that Twitter claimed was the result of some unspecified, innocent quirk in its search algorithms.

It wasn’t a convincing excuse then, and it’s even less so now. At the Daily Wire, Joseph Curl reports that @realDonaldTrump also comes up if you search for the words “Nazi,” “racist,” or “moron” — as do a few other prominent, right-of-center figures:

Second is Gavin McInnes, who describes himself as “Libertarian family man for closed borders & free market. Pro: West, gun, life, gay, Israel, Trump, cop, 1stA. Anti: Nazi, Alt-Right, feminist, Islam. #POYB.” So, yeah, no, anti-Nazi.

Click on the “see all” link and you get Tomi Lahren, a Fox News personality, conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza, and, oh, right there in the fifth slot — the American Nazi Party. Larry Thompson comes in No. 6, but for good reason: He played the Soup Nazi on “Seinfeld.” (Paul Joseph Watson, a writer at Infowars, makes the list at No. 10).

Look up “racist” and guess what? Donald Trump comes up in the No. 2 position. Somebody named Judah Friedlander comes in first place, even though he ID’s himself on Twitter as “Anti-racist/fascist/sexist/imperialist.” So, anti-racist.

It’s easier to swallow that these are natural, non-rigged results in the cases of McInnes, Friedlander, and D’Souza — not because any of them are the slightest bit Nazi or racist, but simply because the first two have the relevant word in their own bios, and D’Souza because the word “Nazi” is in the subtitle of his latest book, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left.

But quick searches reveal that Trump has only ever made one tweet with the word “Nazi” in it, while Lahren has only made four tweets in the span of almost two years containing the word “Nazi.” Trump has made many more tweets with the word “racist” in them, but if there’s no correlation between tweeting the word “Nazi” and the search associating it with an account, then that doesn’t explain why Trump would show up in the latter search.

That leaves us with two possible explanations for all of this: either someone at Twitter is deliberately manipulating the results to send a particularly malicious partisan message about people he or she hates (and Twitter playing politics at the expense of its users would be nothing new), or the frequency with which other Twitter users call people racists and Nazis is enough to get Twitter’s algorithms to associate the people with that name — which would obviously be a terrible standard if the point of a search function is to, y’know, search for who or what you’re looking for, and have faith that impartial results will help you find it.

As I said in…