During the 2016 presidential election, the concept of fake news seemed to permeate the face of Google, Facebook and Twitter for the promotion of false narratives. All of these companies have taken corrective measures, such as deploying fact-checking mechanisms to identify false claims.
Google, adding to the current efforts, announced a partnership with the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), which was launched by The Pynter in 2015. This nonpartisan entity seeks to promote fact-checking best practices, which is being adopted and abided by, by other companies.
The new Google-IFCN initiative will seek to do the following:
- Grow the number of trained fact checkers globally.
- Expand fact-checking capabilities to more countries around the world, “by translating the Code of Principles into ten languages and ensuring credible fact checkers can apply to participate in the IFCN community.”
- Provide access to various fact-checking tools for free.
- Offer engineering resources to develop new fact-checking software tools to improve efficiency.
Another objective is to identify and weed out dubious or malicious claims online in general, but specifically in both Google Search and Google News. Even though fact checking won’t completely cure the manipulation of the news, but it’ll certainly help people recognize credible journalism.