Google’s search results temporarily described the ideology of the California Republican Party as “Nazism” on Thursday. In a statement, a Google spokesperson told the Media Research Center the results were due to an act of “vandalism” on Wikipedia.
On Thursday, users who attempted to search for information pertaining to the California Republican Party were shown results in the Google knowledge panel that claimed the California Republican Party supports Nazism:
A Google spokesperson told the Media Research Center the results were the fault of vandalism done to the Wikipedia page for the California Republican Party:
Sometimes people vandalize public information sources, like Wikipedia, which can impact the information that appears in search. We have systems in place that catch vandalism before it impacts search results, but occasionally errors get through, and that's what happened here. This would have been fixed systematically once we processed the removal from Wikipedia, but when we noticed the vandalism we worked quickly to accelerate this process to remove the erroneous information.
The recent revision history of the California Republican Party Wikipedia page shows a page revision on May 30 that indicated the removal of the tag “Nazism”:
As of 2:30 p.m. ET on Thursday, Google’s search results no longer described any of the ideological positions of the California Republican Party in its knowledge panel:
The ideology section for the California Democratic Party still remains on Google:
Upon reading about the Google search results, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy condemned the results as “just the latest incident in a disturbing trend to slander conservatives.”
