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People pass by the Google logo at the Web Summit in Lisbon on November 8, 2017
Google has blamed “vandalism” on Wikipedia for a search result that linked the California Republican Party to Nazism.
House Majority Leader and California GOP Representative Kevin McCarthy had criticized Google on Thursday for including a “Nazism” tag under the Wikipedia definition of the state party. McCarthy called it a “disgrace” on Twitter.
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In response, Google said the incident “was not the result of a manual change by Google,” but a change made by a user on Wikipedia that it had not caught through its vetting system.
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“We have systems in place that catch vandalism before it impacts search results, but occasionally errors get through, and that happened here,” the company said in response to McCarthy on Twitter.
The Wikimedia Foundation — which hosts Wikipedia — was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.
Google came under fire from U.S. conservatives last year after the firing of software engineer James Damore. Damore was dismissed after a controversial memo he wrote that argued there were less women in tech jobs due to biological differences was made public. The memo itself and Damore’s subsequent firing ignited outrage from both sides of the political spectrum. At the start of the year, Damore filed a class-action lawsuit against his former employer.
Conservative politicians and commentators have also criticized social media and other digital platforms for what they perceive to be unfair treatment and censorship of right-wing perspectives. In March, a U.S. judge dismissed a lawsuit against Google alleging that its video-sharing service YouTube had censored conservatives.
But concerns have mounted over whether platforms like Google and Facebook were used to spread misinformation to sway elections including the 2016 presidential vote that saw Donald Trump elected and the same year’s Brexit referendum in the U.K.
And politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are seeking answers from Facebook after it was revealed that the data of tens of millions was improperly shared with controversial data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.
