According to a report in Vice News, with less than a week to go before the California primary elections, Google officially linked the California GOP to Nazism.
In the “knowledge panel” that provides easy access to information next to search results, Google was showing “Nazism” as an “ideology” of the party as of Thursday morning. The word “Nazism” was hyperlinked to a secondary page that shows “Nazism” alongside other “ideologies” of California Republicans like “Conservatism,” “Market liberalism,” “Fiscal conservatism,” and “Green conservatism.”
California voters have been casting their absentee ballots for weeks ahead of Tuesday’s statewide primary elections, which will help determine the majority in the House of Representative and the potential next governor of the world’s fifth-largest economy.
But voters looking for information by searching “California Republicans” or “California Republican Party” were getting “Nazism” next to their search results until Google took the listing down later Thursday after a query from VICE News.
Dear @Google,
This is a disgrace ⬇️ #StopTheBias pic.twitter.com/8EZhtOLcOD— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) May 31, 2018
Note seems just like the sort of juvenile thing a SJW at Google might get up to but it isn’t harmless (Google, by the way, claims staff can’t do this and the source had be Wikipedia or something, but Vice–hardly known for being conservative–could find no place linking the CAGOP to Nazism but Google). California uses an “top two” primary system where the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, face off in the general. It is hard to know what impact this slight of hand had on absentee ballots or on potential voters, but I’m willing to bet that it had more than $100,000 of Russian Facebook ads. More from The Daily Signal:
Exactly how “Nazism” ended up on the list remains unclear. “Sometimes people vandalize public information sources, like Wikipedia, which can impact the information that appears in search,” a Google spokesperson said, in a statement. “We have systems in place that catch vandalism before it impacts search results, but occasionally errors get through, and that’s what happened here.”
Google maintains that no rogue employee twisted the search results and that the company does not manipulate the platform to favor ideologies. They say this after silencing pro-life ads ahead of an Irish referendum on whether or not to legalize abortion.
“It is libelous and Wikipedia and Google should take more ownership of what is published on their sites, since both companies just said 5 million Californians support Nazism,” said Cynthia Bryant, executive director of the California Republican Party. “It is unfortunate, but is unlikely to affect the election because anyone with common sense knows we don’t support Nazism.”
Uhhhh…she does know she’s in California, right?
I’m sure there are a lot of movement conservatives out there who will argue that Google is a private company and that gives it the right to do most anything it wants to do. When a private company is able to intervene in elections by labeling a major political party as extremist, then it ceases to have the right to make its own decision. Kevin McCarthy, who obviously wants to be Speaker, his sharpening his attacks on the big tech companies:
Kevin McCarthy Won’t Stand For Conservative Censorship https://t.co/4fOHR1QFQC pic.twitter.com/m43jFBtd3h
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) May 24, 2018
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, long seen as a Silicon Valley ally before publicly souring on tech of late, took a fresh shot at the industry todayhttps://t.co/j6AlnX6tDe
— POLITICO (@politico) May 31, 2018
I hope he’s serious. Facebook and Google and Amazon are profoundly anti-democratic corporations with a social and political agenda. They need to be broken up before they become so powerful that they can’t be touched.
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