With the internet being mostly relied on for news today, news consumers find it difficult to differentiate between fake and authentic news. To help combat the spread of fake news, Google will henceforth highlight “authoritative sources” in search results, with a summary of whether the claims of the stories have been fact-checked or not. Google says sites will be judged authoritative by an algorithm and the company will not be fact-checking news stories itself.
Google says sites will be judged authoritative by an algorithm and the company will not be fact-checking news stories itself.
This fact check was introduced on Google’s News search site in October but has now been added to its regular search results. After a news story has been fact-checked, true or false will appear beside it. However, the feature will not affect the order of search results and will not label sites known to spread false information as untrustworthy.
Google said in a blog post: “These fact checks are not Google’s and are presented so people can make more informed judgments. 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.”
The blog post also laid out rules for publishers, to be included in this feature. Google said: “They must be using the Schema.org ClaimReview markup on the specific pages where they fact check public statements (documentation here), or they can use the Share the Facts widget developed by the Duke University Reporters Lab and Jigsaw. Only publishers that are algorithmically determined to be an authoritative source of information will qualify for inclusion. Finally, the content must adhere to the general policies that apply to all structured data markup, the Google News Publisher criteria for fact checks, and the standards for accountability and transparency, readability or proper site representation as articulated in our Google News General Guidelines. If a publisher or fact check claim does not meet these standards or honour these policies, we may, at our discretion, ignore that site’s markup.”
