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, @11:48PM (3 children)
Hardly true. This is one of those things which contributes to that old quote, "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics."
As a simple example, imagine if there was a news source which reported every single time a member of the Israeli police or military killed a muslim, but never reported any time a muslim person killed an Israeli. That would be 100% truth, but that new source would still be horribly bias.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 22 2018, @11:57PM (2 children)
Things are not "bias" unless they are fabric. You mean "biased", as in "having a bias"? English, not just for breakfast anymore!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 23 2018, @06:15PM (1 child)
Guess what, Chuckles? Not every Soylentil is a native English speaker. Both you and I knew what GP meant. So, he stated it in a fashion that few native English speakers would do. His idea came across just fine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 23 2018, @08:27PM
I begin to despair and think that none are, although quite a few apparently are native speakers of American.