Curious voters who have googled “California Republican Party” ahead of the state’s primary early next week have seen the search engine’s “knowledge panel” informing them — falsely — that the party’s ideology includes … wait for it … Nazism.

California’s primary is next Tuesday.

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Google searches for California Republican Party understandably spiked in early May as the primary began to draw nearer. Interest over time hit the highest point in a year this week, as demonstrated in data on Thursday from Google Trends.

Alex Thompson brought the egregious situation to light on Thursday in a piece in Vice News.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) joined Fox News host Laura Ingraham on “The Ingraham Angle” Thursday night to discuss the situation.

“Google is the largest search engine in the world,” said McCarthy. “Ninety percent of all internet searches go through Google.”

McCarthy noted that he reviewed the Wikipedia page for the California Republican Party, but that it didn’t include Nazism.

“It concerns me greatly,” he added, noting his concern that Google or one of its employees could perhaps be to blame.

Ingraham said Google had faulted Wikipedia in a statement. “They usually catch vandalism, congressman, before it impacts search results,” she said, referring to Google’s statement, “but occasionally errors get through, and that’s what happened here.”

McCarthy called for more transparency on Google’s part.

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Earlier in the day, McCarthy took to Twitter to express his feelings on the subject. In a tweet, which he addressed to Google, he appended a screenshot of the knowledge panel with the erroneous “Nazism” entry highlighted, calling it a “disgrace” and tagging it #StopTheBias.

Donald Trump Jr.’s response to the situation was similar.

“Knowledge panels” are boxed-out, bare-bones information sets that appear prominently on the upper right hand side of Google search results pages for specific businesses, organizations, or the like. They are meant to pull together the handy tidbits of information a user is likely seeking.

Theoretically, knowledge panels make it easier to get exactly what people want through a mere glance at the first page of results, with no click-throughs required.

The nuggets of information found within the knowledge panels are regularly auto-populated by sources such as Wikipedia. Many Wikipedia pages, of course, can be edited by almost anyone.

And that’s where the trouble began, or so it seems.

It appears that at least one user nefariously edited the California Republican Party’s Wiki page to include “Nazism” in its ideology section. That, in turn, explains its appearance on Google’s knowledge panel for the organization.

As will shock exactly no one, the edited pages all had one factor in common: conservatism.

This is a discussion page, for example, for a Wikipedia user identified by his or her IP address (which can be shared and can change). A person or persons using this IP address — which geolocators trace to Santa Cruz, California — began getting pegged for sketchy Wiki page edits back in March.

And as will shock exactly no one, the edited pages all had one factor in common: conservatism.

The “User Talk” page dedicated to edits made from that IP address identified questionable changes to the Wikipedia entries of Turning Point USA in March; Erik Prince (Navy SEAL, founder of Blackwater USA, and the brother of Betsy DeVos) in March; the American Legislative Exchange Council in May; and the California Republican Party in May.

The entries that address vandalism to the California Republican Party referenced a change to the ideology section to include Nazism. Anonymous users from that IP address were blocked from editing Wikipedia pages for two weeks for “persistent vandalism” on Thursday evening.

As of now, the knowledge panel is correct; but this issue surely will be watched closely in the days to come.

https://twitter.com/AlxThomp/status/1002251198899073027

Michele Blood is a Flemington, New Jersey-based freelance writer and a regular contributor to LifeZette.