[ad_1]
Hours after the media projected Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 U.S. presidential election on November 7, 2020, rumors and misinformation continued to circulate profusely online. Among the many widely circulated claims was the claim that entering the word “loser” into Twitter’s people search function would return the verified personal account of the President of the United States, Donald Trump:
Hey? Confirmed. https://t.co/fExZuUzdx0 pic.twitter.com/udIpX6wrx7
– Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer) November 7, 2020
(Trump generally used his personal Twitter account during his presidency rather than that of the official government DRINK bill.)
The claim was first posted on November 7 by a Twitter user. Rakesh Agrawal, founder of news and media search engine SnapStream, and was subsequently retweeted by science blogger Phil braid. Both users have accounts verified by Twitter.
On the same day, independent searches conducted by two Snopes employees who entered “loser” into Twitter’s people search field on their mobile phones confirmed that this statement was true.
It was unclear how Twitter’s search algorithm worked to return search results and how the platform famous, there are “many ways to use Twitter search”:
According to the social media management program Hootsuite, all social media algorithms use machine learning to sort content based on ranking signals, which can include how recently a given tweet was posted, its relevance to keywords. in other tweets and participation in the platform and users. that access similar content. In short, a combination of factors could be behind the Trump phenomenon being associated with the word “loser,” including the timeliness of the recent announcement of the election results, as well as the number of tweets that included both the word “loser.” like the nickname or Trump’s name.
In response to our query to Twitter about how the platform’s algorithm works to return search results, a spokesperson told us: “If an account is often mentioned alongside certain terms, they may appear algorithmically as an association. These associations are temporary and change constantly depending on the way people tweet. “
[ad_2]
