Exclusive: Google announced a new “Fact Checking” Mechanism

Accuracy is considered to be one of the fundamental and most crucial principal of journalism. Nonetheless, in this disinformation obsessed world, it is largely ignored on internet based news outlets. It is hard for a layman to decide the authenticity of the stories uttered on digital platform. Yet atleast one Silicon Valley giant, Google has expressed commitment to the accuracy at least in principals.

According to a report published today by Poynter Institute, Google announced that it will flag fact-checking articles in Google News.

Fact-checking gurus around the world have admired this Google move as a huge steps on Twitter.

In the announcement, Google Head of News Richard Gingras writes that the organization is "excited to see the growth of the Fact Check community and to shine a light on its efforts to divine fact from fiction, wisdom from spin."

The links tagged as "fact checks" are from websites that apply a corresponding label to their code, ClaimReview markup. Google will also flag fact-checking content from "sites that follow the commonly accepted criteria for fact checks," though these too will need to use the ClaimReview markup. This is currently in use by fewer than 10 domains. 

To me it seems like a catchy political pitch from the Google as it will legitimize the major giants in the media which are already playing havoc with the largely unaware masses exploiting their brand names.  Whether it will help "crowd out" false claims on the internet remains to be seen

but thiswill definitely lead to escalate the traffic for fact checking outlets and raise Google's profit. 

 

Media Bites - Tazeen Hasan