In 2018, Republicans and conservatives cried “shadow ban” arguing social media platforms were out to get them, using a Vice News story that said that Twitter limited the visibility of Republicans. (Shortly after, Twitter released a statement explaining that a bug had affected not just Republicans, but many users for a short period of time before it was fixed.) But that didn’t keep Donald Trump from hopping on the bandwagon.The fires of suspicion were stoked once again after a Twitter hack that affected the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Gates. In reporting the hack, Motherboard shared screenshots that showed how the hack was executed. The screenshot showed how, internally, Twitter tags certain accounts as "Trend Blacklist" or "Search Blacklist" to mark accounts that have violated community guidelines and have been restricted from appearing in trending pages and searches, respectively. Like in 2018, Trump supporters took this as proof that Twitter is shadow banning them, but as Motherboard puts it: "VICE's traffic tools show tweets by conservatives linking to our article, saying the screenshots we published reveal a shadowban conspiracy, are leading thousands of viewers to our site."