Google News To Combat Fake News with Latest Measures

Google News to Delist Publishers who Aren’t Following New Rules

Google_News

Masking Country of Original

To combat “fake news” and the distribution of irresponsible information distribution that isn’t worthy of being called news, Google News is implementing a new program that will automatically remove news listings that are purposely masking their country of origin or misleading their readers.

Commerce Journalism

Artificial Intelligence  (AI) and algorithms will filter what Google considers as indesirable and Commerce Journalism – which is the practice of charging companies to be featured – and delist them from the Google News directory and feeds.

Following the 2016 election where Russia meddling involved Facebook, the Google networks, and others, the tech giant has been under growing pressure to implement strategies that will prevent such occurrences to happen again.

“Failure to follow these guidelines may result in the removal of your article(s), or entire site, from Google news,” Google notes.

Pay for Play

Google understands that publishers have to monetize a site. For those publishers that at times charge a fee to publish a story, the company implemented in 2013 specific recommendations:

If a website mixes news content with affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing materials (for your company or another party), we strongly recommend that you separate non-news content on a different host or directory, block it from being crawled with robots.txt, or create a Google News Sitemap for your news articles only. Otherwise, if we learn of promotional content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.

Purposely Broadcasting Misinformation

Google News is also reaching out to its readers and asking their participation in the process by providing spam reporters for web surfers who suspects certain publishers to abuse and not respect the Google News inclusion guidelines

“While we may not take manual action in response to every report, spam reports are prioritized based on user impact, and in some cases may lead to complete removal of a spammy site from Google News results,” per Google.

Fact Checking

This past April, Google News started to label individual stories with a “Fact Check” mark.

“Fact check,” to help readers find fact checking in large news stories.You’ll see the tagged articles in the expanded story box on news.google.com and in the Google News & Weather iOS and Android apps, starting with the U.S. and the U.K.

Led by the respected  International Fact-Checking Network, which rigorously fact-checks, the label is of value. With thousands of propagandist daily posts and videos published weekly,  it is doubtful that these efforts are enough to make a significant difference to the war on misinformation, but it is a start. The public definitely needs to be involved and to report every YouTube or news stories that appear to them of a suspicious nature.


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