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Google Apologizes For Altered Picture Of Lawmaker In Search Results

Trudy Wade. Photo credit: ncleg.net

Google has apologized to a Guilford County lawmaker after prominently displaying an altered picture of her.

A search for Trudy Wade turned up an old photo with the word “bigot” superimposed over the it.

A tweet from Google said images that appear in its Knowledge Panel are either selected by verified users or are automatically sourced from sites across the internet.

Earlier in the week, Google blamed Wikipedia for search results that said the ideology of the California Republican Party included "Nazism." Those results were seen in a Google information box screen-captured by Vice News on Thursday.

Vice also reported on the photo of Wade, a Republican State Senator representing District 27.

The photo of Wade was taken down on Friday.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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