Barack Obama conspiracy theories, brought to you by Google Home

During the initial dustup over “fake news,” Google and its parent company Alphabet got less flack for spreading hoaxes than social media platforms like Facebook and Reddit. This week, the search giant is taking its lumps.

First: BuzzFeed explained how Alphabet-owned YouTube became the “engine” of false conspiracy theories like Pizzagate. Strike one.

Second: SearchEngineLand editor Danny Sullivan noticed that Google was passing off right-wing paranoia as the promoted answer to questions like, “Is Obama planning a coup?” and, “Is Obama planning martial law?” Strike two.

(For those not in the loop, “FFS” isn’t a technical term. It stands for “for fuck’s sake.”)

Those bogus search results are also served up as fact on Google’s virtual assistant, Google Home. Unlike a normal page of search results, Google Home doesn’t tell you where its answer came from or give you the option to see other answers.

Here’s a video of BBC tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones getting the same ludicrous answer out of his Google Home:

Steeerrrrrike three!

I asked my Amazon Echo Dot, “Alexa, is Obama planning a coup?”

“Hmm,” Alexa said. “I can’t find the answer to the question I heard.”

Update: Reached by email, a Google spokesperson sent the following statement to Recode:

Featured Snippets in Search provide an automatic and algorithmic match to a given search query, and the content comes from third-party sites. Unfortunately, there are instances when we feature a site with inappropriate or misleading content. When we are alerted to a Featured Snippet that violates our policies, we work quickly to remove them, which we have done in this instance. We apologize for any offense this may have caused.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via