SAN FRANCISCO — Google is blaming “vandalism” at Wikipedia for search results that incorrectly said the ideology of the California Republican Party included “Nazism.”
The results appeared in a Google information box screen-captured by Vice Media on Thursday. Google quickly removed the section on ideology.
Wikipedia’s publicly available change logs show that users added the term “Nazism” to the entry for the California GOP twice in the past week. Both changes were reversed by other editors although the first one was not fixed for almost a week.
California Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, tweeted that the results were a “disgrace.”
California Republican Party executive director Cynthia Bryant called the situation “unfortunate” in a statement, and said Google and Wikipedia should “take more ownership of what is published on their sites.” /kga