Trump says Twitter is 'shadow banning' prominent Republicans - here's what that would mean

Twitter's head of product, Kayvon Beykpour, offered an explanation of what happened through his own Twitter account on Wednesday. In short: Twitter doesn't do shadow bans, ever, and the search issues were unintentional, according to Beykpour.

Twitter began addressing "healthy public conversation" through a variety of changes earlier this year, he said. "In May, we started using behavioral signals and machine learning to reduce people's ability to detract from healthy public conversation on Twitter." Essentially, Twitter is trying to employ user data to make Twitter more usable for people, with this glitch an untintended consequence.

Because of this, he said, "Some accounts weren't being auto-suggested even when people were searching for their specific name." The issue was fixed overnight.

CEO Jack Dorsey pointed to Beykpour's thread, and noted, "It suffices to say we have a lot more work to do to earn people's trust on how we work."

Not in the traditional sense, no. But in a broad sense — sort of, yes.

Wikipedia's definition is an especially good starting point in this case given that the concept is derived from the internet: "The act of blocking a user or their content from an online community such that it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned."

Notably, McDaniel's Twitter account was still active, and her followers still saw her tweets, and the only aspect of her Twitter account that was impacted was her name auto-populating in a search bar. It was slightly more difficult to find her account, but that's all.

"The act of blocking a user or their content from an online community" applies here, but only in the broadest possible interpretation.

Her account wasn't selected by a moderator for exclusion, according to Twitter, but rather fell victim to a flaw in its attempt to use data to improve the service. Furthermore, Twitter says the issue was fixed not long after it was pointed out. And, again, Twitter says it doesn't do that more traditional shadow ban, at all.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment from Business Insider.