Twitter outbursts from Donald Trump have become commonplace since his election with the US President regularly choosing to tweet in place of traditional diplomacy.
His latest outbursts have included an all-caps message towards Iranian president Hassan Rouhani.
The message included warnings not to threaten the US or endure a “mother of all wars”.
Mr Trump’s latest accusations have been directed towards the site itself as he accuses Twitter of “shadow banning” republicans.
What is shadow banning?
Twitter shadow banning is essentially banning a user without their knowledge.
When it comes to Twitter accounts, this means that users who have been shadow banned will not appear as a suggestion in the drop down menu when typed in to the search bar.
For example, typing Mr Trump’s name into the Twitter search bar will yield results for the President’s official account.
If the US President was shadow-banned, typing his name in would not come up with Mr Trump’s official account, but would come up with other accounts of a similar name.
Is shadow banning illegal?
Donald Trump’s twitter outburst said: “Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.”
Shadow banning is an activity many social networking sites engage in to curb activity from unwanted users.
The act is not illegal, and websites are allowed to shadow ban users they deem inappropriate at their own discretion.
The idea behind shadow banning is to prevent users from interacting on the site, but without them knowing, thus resulting in fewer complaints from the person banned.
Are Republican users being shadow banned?
Twitter has been accused of shadow banning Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel, a number of conservative Republican congressmen, and Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesman.
Twitter said they were aware of the issue in a statement, saying: “We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box and shipping a change to address this.”
When questioned about targeting particular accounts, the social media site said that shadow banning was based on account “behaviour” rather than tweet content.
Recent changes to the Twitter platform were apparently made to ensure that people with accounts exhibiting “troll-like” activity would be less a part of the general twitter conversation.
A blog post made in May this year said: “People contributing to the healthy conversation will be more visible in conversations and search.”
So accounts will be shadow banned if they are deemed not making a healthy contribution to the conversation.