Twitter removes Donald Trump's account from searches for offensive terms
Twitter appears to have manually removed Donald Trump's Twitter account from searches for offensive terms such as "racist" and "bigot", having previously featured the US President as the top result.
Several news outlets reported overnight that searching Twitter for certain insulting phrases would see President Trump's famous account - a favourite outlet of the new US leader - appear as the top search result.
Other phrases that surfaced the leader of the free world included "a**hole", "tiny hands" and "#snowflakeinchief"
The results are likely to have been driven by a search algorithm. Due to the significant anti-Trump sentiment among many Twitter users, the service may have linked his account with the phrases. But Mr Trump's account appeared to have been removed from many of the searches as of Thursday morning.
Searching for "racist", "a**hole" and "bigot" returned several tweets declaring that the searches show Mr Trump's account, but the searches themselves no longer display Mr Trump's account.
It is possible that the search algorithm was manipulated by pranksters using a technique similar to Google bombing, in which websites link a particular term to a certain page. This was used in the past to direct Google searches for "miserable failure" to George W Bush's website.
Twitter's search uses different technology, however, and the results may simply be the consequence of a swell of anti-Trump tweets. Other accounts that feature in the search results for "a**hole" include the words in their username or account description, while Mr Trump's account does not.
Hillary Clinton also showed up as a search result for "corrupt".
Twitter has been asked for comment but has not confirmed whether or not it removed the account from search results. It has been known to experiment with product features by varying the service across users or geographies, or the search algorithm may return different results in different places.
Using three separate users searches for "a**hole" no longer returned Mr Trump's account on Thursday morning, while other searches such as "Tiny Hands" still returned Mr Trump's account, suggesting the searches may have been edited.