Greg's Corner

Google to bring fact checking to News

With the advent of fake news sites, wild Facebook claims and slanted political sites, Google has decided to enter the fray. Google has added the tag ‘Fact Check’ to Google News along with the already active tags of ‘highly cited’ and ‘opinion’. Google says that they have strict guidelines in place to be considered a fact checking source. It’s almost guaranteed that someone will try to game the system however, Google has a better reputation for content moderation than someone like Facebook.

Will it be a successful feature though? With the 2016 Presidential Election being what it is, never before have we seen more people clutch to their confirmation bias. Even if a controversial story has been vetted by Google’s fact checking process there will still be a large enough group of people who will refuse to believe the evidence to make the fact check tag irrelevant or they will accuse Google of having a bias.

People who do actually try to fact check a story generally tend to be like-minded, not necessarily politically aligned, but having the same sense of wanting to know the truth. This group tends not to engage the groups with confirmation bias so there will still be a rather large rift between the two. That’s not to say that the fact check tag isn’t completely useless. As long as someone in our society is striving to find the impartial truth then maybe there is hope for civil discourse after all.