Google will now fact check news for you. After Facebook’s very recent attempts at curbing fake news on their site, Google rolls out their fact checker to be available everywhere.
Google and Alphabet owned Jigsaw announced last year that they will start enabling publishers to show a “Fact Check” tag in Google News for news stories. That feature identifies articles that include information fact checked by news publishers and fact-checking organisations, and was initially rolled out to only a selected few countries.
According to a post written by Justin Kosslyn, Product Manager at Jigsaw, and Cong Yu, Research Scientist, “After assessing feedback from both users and publishers, we’re making the Fact Check label in Google News available everywhere, and expanding it into Search globally in all languages.”
Now when you search on Google which returns results containing fact checks for one or more public claims, you will see that information clearly on the search results page. The snippet will display information on the claim, who made the claim, and the fact check of that particular claim.
However, this information won’t be available for every search result, and there may be search result pages where different publishers checked the same claim and reached different conclusions. Google remains that these fact checks are not Google’s and are presented so people can make more informed judgements.
By making fact checks more visible in Search results, Google hopes that people will have “an easier time reviewing and assessing these fact checks, and making their own informed opinions.” This feature was done with the help of other organisations and the fact check community, which has grown to 115 organizations.
Publishers can be included in this feature, details are on the blog post. Only publishers that are algorithmically determined to be an authoritative source of information, as well as follows policies and criterias highlighted on their blog post will qualify for inclusion. If a publisher or fact check claim does not meet these standards or honour these policies, Google may, at their discretion, ignore that site’s markup.
