Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by mrpg on Monday December 18 2017, @06:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the dont-believe-anything-on-the-web dept.

Google has made some changes to try and tackle "fake news":

Google moved to strip from its news search results publications that mask their country of origin or intentionally mislead readers, a further step to curb the spread of fake news that has plagued internet companies this year.

To appear in Google News results, websites must meet broad criteria set out by the company, including accurately representing their owners or primary purposes. In an update to its guidelines released Friday, the search giant added language stipulating that publications not "engage in coordinated activity to mislead users." Additionally the new rules read: "This includes, but isn't limited to, sites that misrepresent or conceal their country of origin or are directed at users in another country under false premises."

A popular tactic for misinformation campaigns is to pose as a credible U.S. news outlet. Russian Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-backed organization, used that technique to reach an audience of nearly 500,000 people, spread primarily through Twitter accounts, Bloomberg reported earlier.

Also at Engadget.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @03:36AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @03:36AM (#611697)

    Yeah sites like archive.org are like airport lockers. For example even if a page is still on archive.org it doesn't really have a decent search engine[1] so it might as well be gone if you or other stuff are dead or don't remember it well enough (exact URL, keywords that work on archive.org).

    For example there used to be a page about an amusing "engrish" menu, and the page was titled: May I take your order
    Not easy looking for it with just archive.org

    You need the actual URL: http://www.rahoi.com/2006/03/may-i-take-your-order.php [rahoi.com]

    But that means you need another source/search engine to help you find that URL.

    Last but not least if someone in the future takes over the domain and changes the robots.txt archive.org could make all the past archived stuff inaccessible (or maybe even delete it?). Ah seems they've stopped being retarded about it: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/ [archive.org]
    Took them quite a while to stop being retarded about it though...

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +1  
       Informative=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   1  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @12:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @12:47PM (#611785)

    Archive.org is pretty much useless for all but the most mainstream non-english speaking websites. You'd be lucky if there's a single capture between 2000 to the present, and even then it will be 99.99% broken.