House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., blasted Google on Thursday immediately after reports revealed that a certain error in the Internet search giant’s Knowledge Panel listed “Nazism” as a principle of the California Republican Party, Fox News informed.
“Sadly, this is just the latest incident in a disturbing trend to slander conservatives,” McCarthy said. “These damaging actions must be held to account. #StopTheBias”
Earlier in the week, McCarthy posted a tweet containing a video of his speech to the Council for National Policy, in which he also criticized what he described as efforts to thwart conservative ideas.
“Social media is being rigged to censor conservative voices,” McCarthy tweeted. “We will not be silenced. #StopTheBias”
The Google error, first discovered by political strategist Eric Wilson, listed “Nazism” among other GOP ideologies, such as “Conservatism,” “Market liberalism,” “Fiscal conservatism,” and “Green conservatism.” The news was first reported by Vice News.
Google’s Knowledge Panel pulls information from various sources from across the web, including Wikipedia.
“Google should apologize for labeling Republicans nazis,” Wilson tweeted. Wilson is the founder of LearnTestOptimize, which describes itself as “a community platform for professionals working at the intersection of marketing, technology, and politics.”
The error has since been removed. When asked for comment, a Google spokesperson told Fox News the error was likely the result of vandalism on one of its sources.
“This was not the result of any manual change by anyone at Google. We don’t bias our search results toward any political party. Sometimes people vandalize public information sources, like Wikipedia, which can impact the information that appears in search,” the spokesperson said via email.
“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 spokesperson continued.
Nevertheless, Donald Trump Jr. was among other conservative voices joining McCarthy in condemning the error.
“This one from @google is even more disgusting than @instagram putting up a note that those searching a # of my name ‘could cause harm and even lead to death’,” Trump Jr. tweeted Thursday. “So much for free thought or speech!”
Silicon Valley has come under fire in recent months for being seen as suppressing conservative voices, including from some senior members of the Republican Party.
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