Speaking with Fox News on Sunday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) has admonished Google and Twitter over anti-conservative censorship, saying they “should be reined in” and calling for a new search engine that doesn’t censor conservatives.
Last week Google was called out after a search result showed the word “Nazism” under the California Republican Party’s ideology – while a search result for North Carolina GOP state senator Trudy Wade included a picture with the word “BIGOT” plastered across the bottom.
Stay classy, Google
(and note the actual Wikipedia page does not include the Nazi reference, only the Google summary) pic.twitter.com/ohq0Hvg1QO
— Brian Riedl (@Brian_Riedl) May 31, 2018
Looks like Google is not a fan of N.C. Sen. Trudy Wade… pic.twitter.com/qEcJuPZjjw
— Colin Campbell (@RaleighReporter) May 31, 2018
Google apologizes after search results label GOP State Sen. Trudy Wade as a ‘bigot’ pic.twitter.com/l7rGWq6sgK
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) June 3, 2018
Google explained the errors as “vandalism” – and that the search results are automatically populated by third-party sites across the internet.
“We have systems in place that catch vandalism before it impacts search results, but occasionally errors get through, and that’s what happened here,” Google said in a statement. “This would have been fixed systematically once we processed the removal from Wikipedia, but when we noticed the vandalism we worked quickly to accelerate this process to remove the erroneous information.”
Meanwhile, Nunes has long criticized Twitter for censoring the Drudge report.
Twitter historically blocks them from being viewed…Same with @DRUDGE_REPORT https://t.co/LSiWPzG8e0
— Devin Nunes (@DevinNunes) May 15, 2018
About two months after the California Republican raised the alarm about Drudge Report “being censored by Twitter,” Nunes again nailed the social media platform for putting up a wall separating users from the top right-leaning news aggregator. “I just looked on Twitter,” Nunes said on “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo.” “The Drudge Report is being censored today, so for the last three or four days I haven’t been able to get on the Drudge Report because it’s being censored on Twitter.” –Washington Examiner
When asked what’s going on with Nunes’ access to the Drudge report from Twitter, a spokesman for the congressman told the Washington Examiner that he is receiving a message saying that the tweets are blocked due to potentially “sensitive content.”
While such warnings of “sensitive content” placed over tweets from Drudge Report can be bypassed by unchecking a box Twitter’s “Privacy and Safety” section, the spokesman explained that the congressman is drawing attention to the extra hoop users are required to jump through to access the tweets.
Twitter did not return a request for comment about why Drudge Report tweets are censored. -Washington Examiner
Nunes asked his Twitter followers in March to retweet his message about censorship if they had seen similar warning messages about the Drudge report – which received 13,000 retweets.
I’m finding many old news story tweets that either favor conservatives or were uncomplimentary to liberals and are now deleted. I can’t tell if the user did it or Twitter. For example; did @DRUDGE really delete this tweet about Roseanne’s ratings? – https://t.co/7iFhK1RPj9
— Keith Barrett (@KeithBarrett) May 20, 2018
Twitter Censors Drudge Tweet of Trump 2020 Slogan as ‘Sensitive Material’.
via @LibertarianBluehttps://t.co/kkQNzvvkQ7 pic.twitter.com/uaWaIP4o4L— Breitbart Tech (@BreitbartTech) March 12, 2018
Not cool @Jack…