Many a times we come across fake news which we nearly believe it to be true. Fake news has become a huge problem to the public as writers publish anything in the internet and there’s no authentication of the news they post. Google has been working on this issue trying to train their systems for recognizing the fake news from the crucial news available on the internet. Apart from this, Google has taken steps by announcing Google News Initiative, a journalism-focused platform announced by Google chief business officer, Philipp Schindler at an event in New York. It will help stop the spread of fake news and it will also provide an opportunity for the writers to partner with Google and monetize their news.
Google listed three specific goals of the initiative as in, highlighting accurate journalism fighting misinformation, helping news site grow from a business perspective and creating new tools to help journalists do their jobs. Google is planning to take this project forward by partnering with universities to evaluate the spread of fake news especially news related to politics and elections.
As part of this project, Subscribe with Google – a service is being launched which will make the work easier for readers to pay and read news content directly with their Google account. A small percentage of the pay received from the readers will be shared with the authors based on the views generated on their article.
Along with this, Google also launched an open-source tool – Outline developed by the company’s technology incubator Jigsaw. Outline will allow writers to create a secure access channel which can be used only by their team. Google will allow them to setup a personal VPN on a private server for their use.
Apart from all this, Google has also launched Disinfo Lab in partnership with First Draft. A project primarily aimed to remove wrong information associated with news and political contents. Google also mentioned that it is working for better identification of what they term as, ‘Synthetic media’ or contents which are modified algorithmically. Google also launched a new program – MediaWise in partnership with Poynter Institute, Stanford University and Local Media Association in order to educate the consumers about the trends in digital information. Google has planned to invest nearly $300 million over a period of three years in this project to help remove fake news from internet. They will also be providing search and analytics tools to all its writers who sign up with this program. This program will surely help fight fake news and support journalism.
