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Google News Initiative announced to fight fake news and support journalism
Google is announcing new efforts today to support the media industry by fighting misinformation and bolstering journalism, which will live under a newly announced umbrella called the Google News Initiative. Google already offers something similar in Europe through the Digital News Initiative, but the Google News Initiative is intended to be a wider worldwide expansion of those kinds of efforts.
There are three specific goals of the Google News Initiative: highlight accurate journalism while fighting misinformation, particularly during breaking news events; help news sites continue to grow from a business perspective; and create new tools to help journalists do their jobs. Google is serious about supporting these goals, too, pledging to invest $300 million over the next three years.
Fighting fake news is obviously one of the most crucial parts of Google's forthcoming efforts. The company has had several brushes with disinformation propagating through search following events like the Las Vegas shooting last fall, making this an area where Google has room to improve. According to Google, the company is working to train its system to be better at recognizing contentious breaking news and adjust toward displaying more accurate results, using the recently added "Breaking News" section on YouTube as an example. But even with those improvements, Google still has problems with search results on YouTube, including issues where conspiracy videos topped the trending results last month following the Parkland shooting. It's good to see that Google is working to improve this, but it'll have a long way to go to regain users' trust.
Also at Bloomberg.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 22 2018, @07:18PM (1 child)
> If you read Google News, you will notice that the news which appears on the main page is very much biased in favor of the liberal view.
Are there many reputable "non-liberal" newspapers and can you recommend some? Most of the larger newspapers I know (NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, several European ones) seem to be classified as "liberal". While that is partly due to "liberal" having basically lost all its original meaning in the US vocabulary and seems to just mean "views we disagree with" at present, it would be interesting to get a better perspective outside the echo chamber.
For google news, to me they seem to just reflect the view common in the majority of newspapers while not adding any further bias on top of that.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Thursday March 22 2018, @07:24PM
As a lefty, I don't trust those because they aren't what you'd call "liberal" in any colloquial sense (perhaps classical) -- not when the use lies to get us into wars in recent and distant history. They're just tools of the oligarchy and by design, actively harm the interests of the populace in favor of the interests of a few.