Twitter has long been criticized for giving platforms to highly visible, far-right personalities with seemingly minimal punishment for what many would consider offensive content. Over the weekend, reporters at Gizmodo noticed that some of the most notorious right-wing accounts on the site no longer show up in Twitter’s search function, at least not without users doing some digging.

By default, Twitter searches on both desktop and mobile bring up results in a drop-down menu. If users do not see what they are looking for in that search view, they can go into a more detailed search view on a separate page.

Gizmodo reported that the accounts belonging to infamous right-wing voices like alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer no longer show up in that first view. Even typing in their exact usernames do not bring them up, as imposter accounts or other accounts with the same names show up instead.

Photo: Michael Cohen/Getty Images for The New York Times

The same is true of white nationalist Jason Kessler and Mike Cernovich, who recently used Twitter to help get “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn fired from Disney. This is curious behavior for the social media website, especially considering Cernovich has a verified account with more than 400,000 followers.

A more detailed search view, however, still brings up these accounts. Other controversial users, like conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, still show up in the same way.

On Saturday, Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey wrote a lengthy thread about how the site can improve in response to Maggie Haberman’s New York Times op-ed on its toxicity. Dorsey seemed to endorse the idea of amplifying or quieting down certain voices depending on conversation topics.

”The downside is that everyone is treated as equally expert on various topics.”



One of the biggest areas I believe we can help. Helping to determine credible voices per topic in real-time is extremely challenging, but believe it’s possible. Mix of algos and network. — jack (@jack) July 21, 2018

Twitter did not specifically respond to an inquiry about the demotion of right-wing accounts from searches. However, Twitter representative pointed International Business Times to a May blog post about improving the site by dealing with trolls.

The site purged some far-right accounts explicitly linked to hate groups back in December but critics still feel Twitter has not done enough to remove white supremacists from its platform. Any Dorsey tweet about a new site feature or policy is usually met with some respondents asking for him to ban any Nazi-related content.

Demoting users like Cernovich from search results is unlikely to appease critics. However, it might align somewhat with more recent moves by the site to remove bad elements. Twitter purges millions of fake accounts each day and stopped counting suspended accounts as followers earlier this month.