On Friday, Vice News reported that the far-left search engine Google labeled a Trump-supporting Republican state senator from North Carolina a “bigot,” using an old photograph that was first posted in February 2012 by a progressive blogger and LGBT activist.
Looks like Google is not a fan of N.C. Sen. Trudy Wade… pic.twitter.com/qEcJuPZjjw
— Colin Campbell (@RaleighReporter) May 31, 2018
According to Vice News:
Trudy Wade is a Republican state senator from North Carolina and an enthusiastic supporter of President Trump.
But if you search “Trudy Wade” on Google, the search giant displays an old photo in the “knowledge panel” of its search results with “BIGOT” superimposed in big red letters.
It’s just the latest example of Google not vetting the information that gets pulled into its “knowledge panels,” which are meant to give users quick information without them having to click through search results (often on other, non-Google websites).
Wade declined to comment to VICE News, but a legislative aide reacted angrily to the search results, adding that “the picture isn’t even current.”
Google removed the picture and apologized to Wade.
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“We apologize to Senator Wade that this image appeared in the Knowledge Panel in Search,” the company said on Twitter. “Images that appear in the Knowledge Panel are either selected by verified users or are automatically sourced from sites across the web.”
In this instance, the image was hosted on a student news blog. Upon being alerted to this issue, we immediately removed it from the Knowledge Panel.
— Google Communications (@Google_Comms) June 2, 2018
Google said the image came from a student news blog, but Vice said it was first used by “local progressive blogger and LGBT activist Matt Comer, who was upset with Wade’s support of a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages and civil unions (which voters ultimately passed in May of 2012).”
“Let me put this as plainly as I can: Mrs. Wade, you are a bigot,” Comer said in 2012, when Wade served on the Greensboro City Council. “In what just world is it appropriate to support a constitutional measure that forever encases an entire minority of people in second-class citizenship?”
Google removed the image on Friday. This is just the second incident this week in which Google’s search has falsely labeled Republicans. As we reported earlier, the tech company claimed the California Republican Party follows Nazism as its political ideology, using false information from Wikipedia.
Vice excused Google, saying that these incidents “likely isn’t about political bias so much as its unwillingness or inability to monitor the meddling in search results around hotly contested races.”
Right. Which explains why these types of things only seem to happen to Republicans…
Related:
- Google Search Showed ‘Nazism’ as Ideology of the California Republican Party
- Dem Rep. Nadler falsely claims social media censorship a ‘hoax,’ but took thousands from Google, Facebook
- Google to Christian publishing house: Remove references to Jesus, Bible in ads
- Allen West: Facebook, Google, Twitter at war with conservatives; Time to fight back
- Report: Google caught primarily targeting conservative sites with dubious ‘fact-check’ feature
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