Twitter was also found, in 2015, to shadowban tweets containing leaked documents in the US. The phenomenon was noticed on Instagram in 2017, when certain posts have been seen to be unavailable to people in hashtag searches. "Shadow banning" became popularized in 2018 as a conspiracy theory that Twitter had shadow-banned Republicans. In late July 2018, "Vice News" found that several supporters of the US Republican Party no longer appeared in the auto-populated drop-down search menu on Twitter, thus limiting their visibility when being searched for; "Vice News" alleged that this was a case of shadow-banning. After the story, some conservatives accused Twitter of enacting a shadowban on Republican accounts, a claim which Twitter flatly denied. However, some accounts that were not overtly political or conservative apparently had the same algorithm applied to them. Numerous news outlets, including "The New York Times", "The Guardian", "Buzzfeed News", Engadget and "New York" magazine, disputed the "Vice News" story. In a blog post, Twitter said that the use of the phrase "shadow banning" was inaccurate, as the tweets were still visible by navigating to the home page of the relevant account. Later, Twitter appeared to have adjusted its platform to no longer limit the visibility of some accounts.