CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCIV) — When searching for Emanuel AME Church on Google with a cellphone, it shows someone has tried to change the category from "place of worship" to "shooting range."
The listing appears to have happened in the last week, shortly after Dylann Roof, the avowed white supremacist who killed nine parishioners there, was sentenced to death.
The suggested change has been removed as of 1:30 p.m. Thursday.
Reviews of the church also so hateful messages.
Someone by the name of Gates of the West whose avatar shows someone in a KKK robe and hood write, "The church definately (sic) needs more books. I went there last year and atleast (sic) 9 people got magazines instead."
Another, user Anthony Dukes, called Emanuel "a racist 'African only' church" that hates whites.
He concluded: "No wonder Dylann Roof was provoked into terminating some of them."
Google has come under fire recently for its search algorithm generating some results that have extreme white supremacist views. In one example, a search for "Did the Holocaust happen?" yields immediate results for Stormfront, a white supremacy website with users who deny the Holocaust happened.
Others, like the search for "black on white crime" that Roof claimed led him into his white supremacist views, display racist results that support the erroneous belief that African Americans commit a disproportionate number of crimes on white victims.
In a video produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Heidi Beirich says Google apparently changed its algorithm twice recently after people pointed out problems in its search results.