Searching for the term ‘loser’ on Twitter delivers US President Donald Trump’s account as the top result.
The search result was first spotted by Twitter users on Saturday after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the presidential elections, beating the incumbent in both the electoral college and popular vote by a substantial margin.
Twitter noted that its search results are not selected or curated by members of staff.
Instead, an algorithm serves results based on certain terms being frequently associated with an account.
“If an account is mentioned often alongside certain terms, they can become algorithmically surfaced together as an association,” Twitter said in a statement.
“These associations are temporal and ever changing based on how people tweet.”
The outgoing US president also comes top when searching for ‘racist’ and ‘liar’ on the platform.
Mr Trump has frequently used Twitter in the past to label rivals and perceived enemies as “haters and losers”.
More than a dozen of his tweets have been flagged for flouting Twitter’s rules in the days following the election, mostly for misleading claims about the electoral process and unsubstantiated claims about widespread voter fraud.
Several leading Democrats called on Twitter to ban Mr Trump for spreading “pure disinformation”, with one congressman describing him as a “threat to democracy”.
As the serving US president, Twitter gives Mr Trump special treatment and is yet to take any serious action against his account, such as a suspension or ban.
Under the company’s public interest rules, “current or potential members of a local, state, national, or supra-national governmental or legislative body” are protected in the interest of public discourse.
Mr Trump’s account will no longer fall under these guidelines when he leaves office in January, meaning he will be suspended or banned if he continues to break the rules.
