Google apologized to Republican Senator Trudy Wade after an image labeling North Carolina’s state Senator as a “bigot” showed up as a top search result for the lawmaker.
According to CBS News, the search engine issued its apology after media aggregator Drudge Report tweeted out a link to a Vice story about the photo, an old image of Wade with the word “bigot” superimposed on it. The image was shown in the “Knowledge Panel,” which is a section that appears on the front for Google searches of well-known figures.
“We apologize to Senator Wade that this image appeared in the Knowledge Panel in Search. Images that appear in the Knowledge Panel are either selected by verified users or are automatically sourced from sites across the web,” Google tweeted.
Google also said that the image was from a “student news blog,” and that they “immediately” removed it from the Knowledge Panel.
Meanwhile, Wade said in a statement that Google’s apology “rang a bit hollow,” adding that she had a staffer sending a request to Google for the image to be removed, but that they did not take action until Drudge Report posted the Vice article.
“Only after Drudge Report posted it to a national audience and it began to go viral on social media did Google do the right thing,” she said. “This was disconcerting to me.”
Wade also criticized the media in her statement, and accused Google of falling prey to “liberal groupthink.”
“I believe one of the reasons this kind of vitriol has become so common and fashionable in our country is the staggering bias of the news media,” she said. “The ‘mainstream’ press – where many of us once looked for truth and reliable reporting – have become cesspools of elitism and intolerance.”
She added that the “lack of ideological diversity in newsrooms across the country” has contributed greatly to spreading hatred against conservatives, particularly conservative women.
However, Matt Comer, the man who says he posted the image originally, said in a tweet that he stands by the photo.
“Wade never reached out to me,” he wrote. “But even if she had, I wouldn’t have taken down the image. Facts are facts, and the fact is: Trudy Wade is a bigot.”
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