Fake news has been something of a hot topic as of late, and we’ve seen various tech companies take steps to prevent it or to combat it. Facebook has been working on various ways to combat these fake news articles, and recently launched a new tool that will go towards the fight of fake news.Google has also been taking steps and recently the company has announced that they will now be rolling out a new feature in its search engine that helps users identify stories that are fake. This comes in the form of the “fact check” tag as you can see in the screenshot above, there articles listed in the search results will rely on services like PolitiFact or Snopes to determine if their content is real or fake.
According to Google, “For the first time, when you conduct a search on Google that returns an authoritative result containing fact checks for one or more public claims, you will see that information clearly on the search results page. The snippet will display information on the claim, who made the claim, and the fact check of that particular claim.”
However Google notes that this isn’t necessarily a guarantee that what you see listed as real may indeed be real. They say that sometimes different publishers can check the same claim but reach different conclusions, but they add, “Even though differing conclusions may be presented, we think it’s still helpful for people to understand the degree of consensus around a particular claim and have clear information on which sources agree.”
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