Earlier today, Rep. Kevin McCarthy pointed out that Google search results for the California Republican Party were listing “Nazism” as the party’s ideology.

Dear @Google,
This is a disgrace ⬇️ #StopTheBias pic.twitter.com/8EZhtOLcOD

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) May 31, 2018

Sadly, this is just the latest incident in a disturbing trend to slander conservatives. These damaging actions must be held to account. #StopTheBias https://t.co/6ztyuc772s

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) May 31, 2018

Understandably, the GOP in CA is upset by this. From Vice News:

“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.”

“There’s nothing worse you can call someone than labeling them a Nazi,” said Eric Wilson, a longtime Republican digital consultant and founder of Learn Test Optimize. “Google owes Republicans an apology whether it was an algorithm or a human, they’re ultimately responsible.”…

Republican Party Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale sent a letter last week to Facebook and Twitter requesting for more transparency by the companies in how they are preventing political bias internally.

“Google owes conservatives answers and assurances that they are putting an end to this,” McDaniel said in a statement to VICE News. “Evidence is mounting that conservative voices are either being suppressed or, as it appears in this case, being falsely depicted as hateful extremists.”

The information in that sidebar is taken from Wikipedia. Google apologized and said its systems were supposed to catch instances of vandalism but “occasionally” those systems fail:

We regret that vandalism on Wikipedia briefly appeared on our search results. This was not the the result of a manual change by Google. We have systems in place that catch vandalism before it impacts search results, but occasionally errors get through, and that happened here.

— Google Communications (@Google_Comms) May 31, 2018

This would have been fixed systematically once we processed the removal from Wikipedia, but when we noticed the vandalism we worked quickly to accelerate the removal of the erroneous information.

— Google Communications (@Google_Comms) May 31, 2018

According to the Wikipedia talk page, the addition of Nazism was made on May 24th and reverted Wednesday night. One user wrote, “It’s alarming that Wikipedia’s automated processes failed to catch and correct this glaringly obvious libel.”

It does seem like this is a particularly glaring example of the kind of vandalism Google’s systems ought to be primed to detect. How did this one survive a week?