If you want to find a specific Donald Trump tweet, you may have to go through his timeline and search for it yourself. According to x/”>Mediaitex has disabled the ability to search for Trump's tweets. As the post explains, you can search for specific posts by typing "from:(username without the @ symbol)" followed by the term or phrase you are searching for.
So if you want to see the former president's tweet in which he said that COVID cases and deaths are… "very exaggerated in the United States" due to CDC "ridiculous method of determination," You could do a search for "from:realDonaldTrump COVID." That's supposed to bring up all of your tweets with the term. "COVID-19," Except… it doesn't appear. What does appear is a selection of his tweets that don't even appear in chronological order. We were able to replicate the results Mediaite has reported, as can be seen below.
The former president's twitter account was suspended in 2021 after the company determined that some of his tweets violated its policies. He was banned from the website following the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Trump sued twitter in an attempt to get his account back, but it wasn't until Elon Musk took control that it was reinstated. His first and only post since then was his mugshot, which was taken when he was accused of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
As Mediaite Notes: It's not entirely clear why this is happening. Other accounts that had been suspended in the past and then reinstated, such as Alex Jones', remain searchable. Accounts of other high-profile political figures, such as Kamala Harris, also remain searchable. A software engineer the publication spoke to claimed that this was a deliberate move on x's part, as the issue does not appear to affect other previously suspended users. We've reached out to x for a statement and will update this post if we hear back. However, it's worth noting that there is a free resource called "Trump twitter Archive" which contains a searchable database of Trump's tweets, and still works perfectly.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/x-appears-to-be-suppressing-trump-related-searches-140026507.html?src=rss
