Google ‘Did the Holocaust Happen’ — and a Neo-Nazi Site Is the Top Hit
Image by Getty Images
By Sam Kestenbaum December 13, 2016
Googling “did the Holocaust happen” returns an unsettling answer: A page from the Neo-Nazi website Stormfront titled “Top 10 reasons why the Holocaust didn’t happen.”
The page’s place on the Google search results was originally reported by the Guardian on Sunday and picked up by a slew of other sites. On Tuesday afternoon, the site was still the first result.
“Every White nationalist with a bookish bent should make himself an expert on this issue,” a user going by the name A-Train writes on the Stormfront forum. “The Holocaust Lie more than anything else keeps us down. The twin themes of White guilt and Jewish victimhood are inerwoven [sic] into this monstrous hate-religion that is now being foisted upon generations of White children around the world.”
A Google spokesperson told Fortune that the company does not intend to do anything to change the search results.
“We are saddened to see that hate organizations still exist. The fact that hate sites appear in Search results does not mean that Google endorses these views,” said the spokesperson in a statement. According to the company, a site’s ranking in search results is determined by computer algorithms, Fortune reported.
“We do not remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content, malware and violations of our webmaster guidelines,” the spokesperson said.
Former Klu Klux Klan head David Duke seemed pleased with the controversy:
Oy Vey! Call the ADL…… https://t.co/frEO030PP0
— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) December 12, 2016
This comes only a week after a separate Google controversy, where the site’s auto-complete results suggested “are Jews evil” as a popular search.
Email Sam Kestenbaum at kestenbaum@forward.com
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
