Google Lists ‘Nazism’ As Ideology Of California Republican Party After Wikipedia Prank
With less than one week to go before the California primary, Google listed “Nazism” as the ideology of California’s Republican Party, Vice News reported.
On Thursday morning, under “ideology” the search engine listed the words “Nazism”, “Conservatism,” “Market liberalism,” “Fiscal conservatism” and “Green conservatism” when California Republican Party was searched.
One white supremacist candidate running as a Republican in the upcoming California Senate race, Patrick Little, has called for a government “free from Jews.”
Little was banned by the state party from registering for their convention and was removed by security while reportedly “kicking and dragging an Israeli flag on the ground.”
Another Republican candidate, John Fitzgerald, claimed on his website that Jews played a “prominent role” in the African slave trade.
Fitzgerald was condemned by the California GOP.
“The California Republican Party’s Board of Directors took swift and decisive action to eliminate any support for John Fitzgerald due to anti-Semitic comments he made recently — those views have no home in the Republican Party,” California Republican Party chairman Jim Brulte said in a statement.
Google took the listing down on Thursday and blamed “vandalism” at Wikipedia for the search result, Time reported. Wikipedia also deleted the “Nazism” entry.
“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 said in a Thursday statement. “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.”
Statewide elections will take place on Tuesday.
Contact Haley Cohen at hcohen@forward.com
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