The big tech company that stifles pro-life advertisements, silences employees who disagree with their progressive agenda, and sells private information off to the NSA, just linked the GOP to Nazis.
According to Vice News (which is not exactly a right-leaning source), the search engine Google has listed “Nazism” as just one among many of the ideologies governing the California GOP. The bizarre link comes just one week after the California mid-term primary.
“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,” reports Vice News. “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.'” Behold the insanity:
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Voters in the California primary that searched for either “California Republicans” or “California Republican Party” saw the “Nazism” link in their search results. Google removed the list when VICE News confronted them on Thursday.
Republicans in the state have cited the gaffe as proof-positive that big tech wants to silence their views.
“It is disgraceful that the world’s largest search engine has labeled millions of California Republicans as Nazis,” said Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Majority Leader. “This is just the latest incident in a disturbing trend to slander conservatives. These damaging actions must be held to account. The bias has to stop.”
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.”