Google says it didn’t censor Winston Churchill’s image, apologizes for tech error

Google said it did not deliberately hide Winston Churchill’s image from users searching for the United Kingdom’s prime ministers.

Searchers discovered when they queried Google for “UK prime ministers” that images for Churchill did not appear in the search results alongside images of the other prime ministers this weekend. Google apologized and said it was not censoring Churchill’s visage.

“We’re aware an image for Sir Winston Churchill is missing from his Knowledge Graph entry on Google. We apologise for any concern,” wrote Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison for search, on a Google Support website this weekend. “This was not purposeful & will be resolved. Images in such panels are automatically created & updated. During an update, they can briefly disappear.”

Mr. Sullivan wrote that when an image is removed amid an update to Google’s Knowledge Graph, the subject of the image will be named in search results but no image will appear and that is what happened to Churchill.

Churchill’s image was restored to Google as of Monday morning, but his statue remained covered in London this weekend. The late prime minister’s statue was boarded up in London on Friday over concerns of vandalism from Black Lives Matter protesters, according to the BBC, after it was covered in graffiti during the previous weekend’s demonstrations.

Prior to Google’s explanation of the missing image, some Google users wondered whether the company was reacting to the decision to board up the statue in London’s Parliament Square. Mr. Sullivan’s explanation does not mention the treatment of the statue and said the technical glitch did not singularly impact Churchill.

“It might be that our systems are only displaying the last term of prime ministers who had non-consecutive terms,” Mr. Sullivan wrote. “We’ll seek to address this to avoid any unintentional concern.”