Google’s Rolling Out A Fact-Check Feature To Combat Fake News
We’ve been covering the increasing prevalence of Fake News, at our site, for quite a few months now. We’ve also highlighted what Facebook (the main protagonist of the story, so far, has been doing to combat the widespread menace of half-truths.
In an attempt to deal with the growing problem of fake news and misinformation, Google has now decided to roll out a feature to “fact-check” search results and news looked at through its platform.
So, going forward, when you search for something on Google, if the search query returns a result that has been marked as disputed or fake, Google will highlight the matter and display who made the claim, and will also indicate if a third-party organization (identified by Google) has found the item to be true, false or somewhere in between.
In addition to the review of the information, the new feature will also provide users with a link, so that they can provide feedback in case they think something is wrong.
However, the “if” in that statement is quite important, because not all results will appear with a review, for now.
Google first tried this out last year in a limited capacity on their news results, just a few weeks before the U.S. Presidential elections. Now, they are rolling it out completely, in all countries, and languages that Google functions in. It will now encompass two of Google’s biggest and most far-reaching entities — Search and News results.
Google’s move comes right after Facebook put up a “disputed” feature on their platform, to flag news that might not be accurate, or might not be coming from trustworthy sources.
Internet platforms have been receiving a lot of criticism for the spread of fake news, and misinformation, to an extent that Germany is currently in the process of establishing a law to fine social media platforms it deems are contributing to the problem.
Some other countries in Europe are considering a similar approach.
In the aftermath of the completed unexpected selection of Trump to the throne of U.S. presidency, the news online has become pretty much a topic of distrust around the world.
Not wanting to painted (or tainted) in the same colour, Google has played it’s own Ace of Diamonds, through this move.
The key here is that Google has not taken on the task of fact-checking the information themselves — instead opting to rely on specialist and better-equipped third party organization like Politifacts and Snopes, to assess the veracity of statements made by public officials and news organizations. There are about 115 of those !
This is quite interesting because even Facebook, when they rolled out their “disputed” tag, took the responsibility of the verification out of their organization, and put the onus on third party organizations like Politifacts and Snopes. They also enabled their own users to report stories that might be misinformation, in a manner different from what Google is doing, and even though, on the face of things that does look helpful, it might run them into a huge task of sorting out through claims of the billions of users.
As far as the credibility of Google’s verification is concerned, it openly says there might be times that different fact checking organizations might disagree, and it would be listing out the disagreement as well.
“These fact checks are not Google’s and are presented so people can make more informed judgements. Even though differing conclusions may be presented, we think it’s still helpful for people to understand the degree of consensus around a particular claim and have clear information on which sources agree. As we make fact checks more visible in Search results, we believe people will have an easier time reviewing and assessing these fact checks, and making their own informed opinions”, Google said in their announcement blog post.
While we are indeed happy that Google has decided to come on board in a fight against misinformation, we are uncertain of how effective this will be, for now. The amount of information that goes on to the internet everyday is obviously a lot, and it may take third party sources several days before the information can be verified. And this stands only for information that is yet to be put on to the internet; there does not seem to be a method to verify the information that already exists effectively.
What might be another “umm” moment is that what this fact-checking feature won’t do is improve the search rank for fact-checking sites or bring their information to the top of the page in Google’s “featured snippets” box. What they should have ensured is that the review snippet display on top of the search results, regardless of however few searches it shows up on for now.
Regardless, we welcome this first step, because that is better than none!
Originally published at Chip-Monks.
