Twitter is a fun place and full of surprises. Some Twitter users on Wednesday noticed that when they searched for the word “asshole”, they received a recommendation for the profile for US President, Donald J. Trump.
Haha, type “asshole” into Twitter’s search bar. Do it.
— Greg Jenner (@greg_jenner) January 26, 2017
Um is this a troll by some coder at Twitter? If you search “asshole” (no quotes) this is what comes up. pic.twitter.com/dcLnu4BUdq
— Yashar (@yashar) January 26, 2017
Slowly that spread really fast and people came up with new surprising results. The same happened with several other words, including “fascist,” “racist” and “bigot.”
Donald Trump’s account is the first thing when you search the word fascist, bigot, racist, or asshole on Twitter pic.twitter.com/BZ4cLiCqwi
— Sam Stryker (@sbstryker) January 26, 2017
It also happened when they searched the word “goldenshower” and ”tiny hands”:
@sbstryker @jonfavs also “goldenshower” pic.twitter.com/1IeqezqABV
— Phil (@WellWtfPhil) January 26, 2017
@sbstryker @jonfavs also “tiny hands” pic.twitter.com/yjehspfW88
— Phil (@WellWtfPhil) January 26, 2017
Twitter hasn’t explained yet as to how this was happening. But it is speculated that since Trump’s mentions are full of people calling him an asshole (and other cuss words), this convinced Twitter’s search algorithm that the word is associated with his name.
Not a troll. Algorithm to find relevant accounts based on the “discussions” they are part of, i.e. lots of tweets to Trump using “asshole”. https://t.co/0wlUntdKeV
— Izzy Galvez (@iglvzx) January 26, 2017
However, the last we checked, Twitter has now stopped pulling up the same results.
Telegraph reported that Twitter appears to have manually removed Donald Trump’s Twitter account from searches for offensive terms.













