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Google News Introduces Fact Check Feature -- Just In Time For the US Election (thenextweb.com) 367

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Next Web: Google today introduced a new feature that will tag and help find "fact checking in large news stories." Tagged articles will show up in the new story box on news.google.com, as well as in the Google News and Weather app for iOS and Android in the US and UK. There's a two-pronged approach to detecting fact checking. First Google looks for actual markup in the site's source code. Then Google looks for pages "that follow the commonly accepted criteria for fact checks." You can learn more about the process here. To be clear, the tags show up in small grey text above the article links -- Google itself isn't passing judgement, nor does it tell you the source article's conclusion in search results. It's merely a sign that says "hey, read me to find out the truth." Still, it's a nice way to make sure readers are at least forming opinions based on fact rather than fiction.
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Google News Introduces Fact Check Feature -- Just In Time For the US Election

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  • Yeah. Right (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13, 2016 @08:24PM (#53073451)

    Google will check with Hillary's campaign to see if it's okay to repeat the lies or just substitute their own. Credibility and truth will little to do with it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by ClickOnThis ( 137803 )

      Of the two main candidates in this race, one of them has a much more difficult relationship with the truth. [politifact.com]

      So, it would hardly be surprising if Google's fact-check alarm went off more frequently with that candidate.

      • Re:Yeah. Right (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14, 2016 @01:31AM (#53074427)

        Oh look it's a Politifact shill. Totally not biased! Much neutral! [imgur.com]

        • Re:Yeah. Right (Score:4, Informative)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Friday October 14, 2016 @06:48AM (#53075137) Homepage Journal

          Funny thing is Rachel Maddow has been doing a series on how Politifact gets it wrong with Democrats. You can watch it on YouTube.

          In other words, you can pick and choose examples to "prove" bias either way, or just do the sensible thing and accept that Politifact is kinda shit.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Because MSNBC is a paragon of virtue and facts. ... ... ... Bwhahahahahahaaa! MSNBC is a DNC Propaganda Bureau.

            And that has been proven and fact checked. Many of the so-called news outlets have been caught with direct ties and cooperating heavily (and possibly illegally) with the DNC and the Clinton Campaign. Uh, did MSNBC report that fact?

        • by dywolf ( 2673597 )

          that's not proof of bias jackass.
          proof of bias would be if you could disprove their conclusion of those statements.

          which you are totally free to attempt to do.

          until you can prove politifact wrong, the fact that the democrats are telling fewer untrue statements than the GOP isn't a sign of bias.

        • If anything in this discussion is biased, it's your graphic. It cherry-picks individual ratings to make it seem like politifact favors dems. One could easily construct the same kind of disingenuous graphic that shows the reverse.

          Politifact has been praised and criticized by both sides. [wikipedia.org]

  • Great! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13, 2016 @08:31PM (#53073477)

    Nothing like letting a group with publicly declared political affiliation put in automatic links to "TRUTH".
    I wonder how they'll rate the AP, the "news" org that tried to declare that Assad was an ISIS ally?
    Or NBC, which declared that Hillary did nothing wrong with her email server, because she used no "corrosive chemicals" to destroy evidence?
    Or Google, when they declared they were not cooperating with the NSA to deliver email content? Oh, wait...

    captcha: "erasable"

    • I'm just waiting for the fact-checkers to start fact-checking each other. I'll start a fact-checker-checker website. The whole thing will implode.
    • AP is probably the most reliable news outlet out there. They don't do editorializing for one. They do make mistakes but they correct those mistakes. Their customers are news media outlets, not the end users, so they're not stocked up on sensationalism to boost their readership like cable tv.

      Of course anything coming out this close to the election may as well just be considered a lie by default. From BOTH campaigns. Anyone who feels that their candidate never lies and the other candidate only lies is to

  • by CQDX ( 2720013 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @08:39PM (#53073505)

    which is the burying of critical stories. All these released tapes and allegations of sexual assault should have come out long ago, at least before the RNC primary. Instead they were intentionally held to benefit HRC.

    • Instead they were intentionally held to benefit HRC.

      Your claim is interesting, but I don't see a "Fact Check:" label anywhere.

    • by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @08:56PM (#53073591)

      which is the burying of critical stories. All these released tapes and allegations of sexual assault should have come out long ago, at least before the RNC primary. Instead they were intentionally held to benefit HRC.

      Actually it's just a case of what-goes-around-comes-around. Some of the women have explicitly stated that they were motivated to come out by his denials during the second debate.

      Poetic justice, IMO, after featuring Blll Clinton's accusers as the centerpiece of his strategy last weekend. He's outraged that anyone would be interested in the same accusations against him.

      • by meta-monkey ( 321000 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @09:23PM (#53073735) Journal

        I applaud these women. The vast, vast majority of women, sexually assaulted on a fucking airplane full of people by a goddamn billionaire would have immediately screamed bloody murder and filed lawsuits resulting in multi-million dollar settlements. But no, these brave, strong independent wymynz stoically held their silence for 30 goddamn years to all release their stories on the same day 4 weeks before an election for God and cuntry. There's nothing at all fishy about this to anyone except those who hate strong independent wymynz what don't need no man.

        • by Swave An deBwoner ( 907414 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @09:40PM (#53073811)
          Things were different 30 years ago. A woman who screamed bloody murder and filed lawsuits would have been slut shamed mercilessly. And she said that she expected that it would cost her her job in the meantime.
          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Jack9 ( 11421 )

            How different were things last year?

        • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13, 2016 @10:00PM (#53073885)

          https://i.sli.mg/iBUuJ9.png
          https://i.sli.mg/jbe6G3.png
          https://i.sli.mg/2jvEeE.jpg

          nothing fishy at all

        • by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @10:04PM (#53073893) Journal

          The vast, vast majority of women, sexually assaulted on a fucking airplane full of people by a goddamn billionaire would have immediately screamed bloody murder and filed lawsuits resulting in multi-million dollar settlements.

          Do you believe Juanita Broderick? She waited twenty years to come forward.

          I can only imagine the frustration of being a Trump supporter and realizing that you have the one candidate who makes Bill Clinton's creepy sexual history meaningless. All you had to do is find a candidate who wasn't a skeeve, and yet you flocked to the self-professed skeeve like ants to a piece of rotting fruit.

          Donald Trump will never be president. Mark it down. Learn from your mistakes. And for chrissake, stop your whining.

          • by Orgasmatron ( 8103 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @11:35PM (#53074157)

            She was scared to accuse the Attorney General of the state (who already had a body count). Also, in 1978, inviting a man up to her room could plausibly be taken the wrong way. Remember what Hillary had already done to Kathy Shelton a few years earlier. If Juanita had formally accused Bill of rape, she'd have been on the receiving end of all that, and probably much more.

            Still, she didn't keep completely silent, she told a few people, including a nurse that found her in bed a few hours after the attack, and some other close friends. Some of those people blabbed, and word got out. People hid tape recorders when talking to her in hopes of getting her to drop her guard and talk about it. She refused to talk about it, saying "you can't get to him, and I'm not going to ruin my good name to do it ... here's just absolutely no way anyone can get to him, he's just too vicious".

            After something like seven years of trying to get her to talk, the story was openly circulating in the tabloids with her name attached, and she finally relented.

            If you've seen any of the early interviews with her, it is pretty obvious why she didn't want to talk about it for 20 years. It is still a very painful memory for her, and she is visibly shaken when talking about it.

            There are some notable elements missing from Juanita's story. Until Trump tricked them, the press wouldn't touch her story with a 10 foot pole because it is missing these elements, which apparently dictate which stories are credible:
            * plagarism from other famous sexual assault cases and/or pop songs
            * robotic monotone retelling
            * claims that her attacker had superhuman strength (to bend a solid aluminum airline seat)
            * total silence even to her closest friends until the last few weeks before an election
            * contradictory stories told to close friends at the time of the incident
            * The One Ring to become invisible to slip past guard/chaperones stationed outside the door
            * laughably public setting
            * heavy involvement with the other candidate's campaign

        • You'd be amazed at how many people freeze up, often due to fear, when these kinds of things happen. They were never trained to beat the shit out of the asshole molesting them, and often were taught to not physically fight someone since these were women. ("Ladies don't hit people...", etc.)
          If someone doing that kind of garbage has some way of asserting the impression of authority, it makes it even harder for people to act against them. One of those little foibles of a cooperative society.
          Also don't forget th
      • Actually it's just a case of what-goes-around-comes-around. Some of the women have explicitly stated that they were motivated to come out by his denials during the second debate.

        Poetic justice, IMO, after featuring Blll Clinton's accusers as the centerpiece of his strategy last weekend. He's outraged that anyone would be interested in the same accusations against him.

        Trump's outrage: Donald Trump Calls Allegations by Women ‘False Smears’ [nytimes.com]

        “The establishment and their media neighbors wield control over this nation through means that are very well known — anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe and morally deformed,” Mr. Trump said. “They will seek to destroy everything about you, including your reputation. They will lie, lie, lie, and then again, they will do worse than that. They will do whatever’s necessary.” [emphasis mine]

        And *anyone* that challenges Trump ... um, well... pretty much the same thing.

        [ He -- and the RNC (establishment) and Fox News (media neighbors) -- really shouldn't be casting these stones. ]

        • Actually it's just a case of what-goes-around-comes-around. Some of the women have explicitly stated that they were motivated to come out by his denials during the second debate.

          Poetic justice, IMO, after featuring Blll Clinton's accusers as the centerpiece of his strategy last weekend. He's outraged that anyone would be interested in the same accusations against him.

          Trump's outrage: Donald Trump Calls Allegations by Women ‘False Smears’ [nytimes.com]

          “The establishment and their media neighbors wield control over this nation through means that are very well known — anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe and morally deformed,” Mr. Trump said. “They will seek to destroy everything about you, including your reputation. They will lie, lie, lie, and then again, they will do worse than that. They will do whatever’s necessary.” [emphasis mine]

          And *anyone* that challenges Trump ... um, well... pretty much the same thing.

          [ He -- and the RNC (establishment) and Fox News (media neighbors) -- really shouldn't be casting these stones. ]

          Trump is showing that he doesn't even know how to be a politician. After the tape came out on Friday, a real politician would have rushed to the cameras with his best insincere apology ("in case anyone was offended"), dismissed it as a youthful indiscretion, and put it behind him.

          But Trump's ego and thin skin won't allow that. Instead he has to find someone to blame for his self-inflicted wounds, and go on the offensive against them. Rather than defusing the situtation, he escalates it into a battle he c

    • What are you talking about? After hearing Trump describe his seduction method as "grab their pussy and kiss them" I have changed my vote from Ms Clinton to Mr Trump.

      He's the Man!

      I have also been arrested for sexual assault whilst following his advice and I hope that Mr Trump will issue a Presidential pardon to me as soon as he is sworn in.
    • by jrumney ( 197329 )
      Oh, so because his Republican opponents preferred to keep his closet door closed for fear of their own skeletons being exposed in retaliation, it is wrong for Hillary to go digging in there now?
  • Sure Google.... (Score:4, Informative)

    by dbreeze ( 228599 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @08:47PM (#53073553)

    ... as though I'm going to trust a mega-corp for the truth.
    http://www.democracynow.org/20... [democracynow.org]
    https://capitalresearch.org/20... [capitalresearch.org]
    https://www.spreaker.com/user/... [spreaker.com]
    http://observer.com/2016/08/te... [observer.com]

  • by Crashmarik ( 635988 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @08:59PM (#53073611)

    https://www.bing.com/search?q=... [bing.com]

    Hell the man built a company just to help Hillary (search for Hillary, Eric Schmidt, Groundgame)

    So just who is going to be able to fact check Google's already established bias ?
    https://www.techdirt.com/artic... [techdirt.com]
    http://dailycaller.com/2016/09... [dailycaller.com]

    I think I am going to start rotating search engines. Variety is likely for the best.

    • Pretty obvious you have the Google hate-boner thing happening here, as you apparently did a search for "Google" and "bias", then pasted the first 2 results that appeared to bash Google without even reading them.

      Otherwise, you'd surely have noticed that they're both really laughably shitty articles that do nothing whatsoever to back you up, right?

  • If statement agrees with the establishment: Fact.
    If statement disagrees with the establishment: Not Fact.

    • I take it that you consider Donald J Trump -- real estate developer, casino operator, restaurant operator, resort hotel operator, golf course developer, and self-proclaimed multi-billionaire -- a man who is shrewd enough to take his companies into bankruptcy when other people's money can be lost instead of his own, and smart enough to pay no income tax for the last 18 years, "not establishment".

      Really?
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by Jack9 ( 11421 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @10:26PM (#53073937)

        I guess you are in the camp of "both are establishment", which makes no sense to me. They both have money and are elitist, but that's not the issue in a principate. This may literally be one of the last times (in anyone reading's lifetime) that the political arena will result in a choice between a self-appointed egoist (who basically scammed his way via celebrity) and a multinational political favorite for POTUS. This will poison that contest forever, either through his failure to win or his failure as a president.

      • by bongey ( 974911 )

        Pretty simple how many 100s of millions did Trump get from Wall Street, Answer none.

        • by iwbcman ( 603788 )

          The density of thought in that sentence is approaching that a of a black whole, from which no thought will ever escape.
          The Donald *is* Wall Street.
          Hillary just goes to Wall Street for money like nearly every one else.
          Is the reality distortion field so great that this actually requires stating?
    • by Fwipp ( 1473271 )

      You think the establishment is far-left?

      Goodness.

    • If statement agrees with the establishment: Fact.
      If statement disagrees with the establishment: Not Fact.

      Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted.

    • Facts are verifiable data.
      Some people call things facts that are not facts.
      How people present facts may be false or incomplete, but facts aren't, they are still verifiable data.

      It's possible to be deceptive and still use facts, after all, you can mix them with lies, but it still doesn't change that facts are facts. If you do fact checking, you are verifying the data of the statement. If it passes, it's actually a fact and not a fake. If it fails to be verified, odds are you are looking at a lie.

      What's so bl
  • Google Facts (Score:4, Informative)

    by bestweasel ( 773758 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @09:19PM (#53073707)

    Hoping this from one of the links will lead to better-informed comments:

    Fact Check
    Google News may apply this label to your content if you publish stories with fact-checking content that's indicated by schema.org ClaimReview markup, especially round-up stories that contain multiple fact-check analyses within a single article. The (fact-checking) label helps users find fact-checking content in major stories.

    When determining whether to use this tag for your article, consider whether that article meets the following criteria, which we consider characteristics of fact-checking sites:

    Discrete claims and checks must be easily identified in the body of fact-check articles. Readers should be able to understand what was checked, and what conclusions were reached.

    Analysis must be transparent about sources and methods, with citations and references to primary sources.

    The organization must be nonpartisan, with transparent funding and affiliations. It should examine a range of claims in its topic area, instead of targeting a single person or entity.

    Article titles must indicate that a claim is being reviewed, state the conclusions reached, or simply frame that the articleâ(TM)s contents consist of fact checking.

    Please note, that if we find sites not following those criteria for the ClaimReview markup, we may, at our discretion, either ignore that site's markup or remove the site from Google News.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Sounds like sites that serve lies (of whatever you want to call non-facts presented as facts) need to invest a bit more effort. On the plus side, if they do, they now have more clout, because "Google says it is true".

    Another instance of Google "engineers" and "scientists" grossly overestimating what can actually be automatized and what cannot. Or maybe they just do not care as long as they get more clicks. Google is much more of a problem these days than a good thing.

    • by guruevi ( 827432 )

      If it IS fully automated based on all the information out there, then how will the system know what's real and fake? At some point someone will have to do the curating and that's where the bias will show.

      The easiest way to fact check stories is as follows:
      - Was it said by a politician: It's false
      - In all other cases: Inaccurate at best

  • by ugen ( 93902 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @09:43PM (#53073829)

    Why does Google have to be so anti-Trump?

    • When google was founded, their motto was "Don't be evil". When they made it big time, they built new facilities and moved their offices. Sadly, the motto was damaged in the process, and they were only able to salvage the last two words.

    • by bongey ( 974911 )

      President Oboner showing of his 'Agent' as they call it double the views in 24 hours but is missing from the trending videos.

      Ohh nooesss , hurry come up with a lame excuse.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13, 2016 @09:52PM (#53073855)

    If something is never reported, it can never be fact checked.

    captcha: industry

  • Politicizing your service in **ANY** way is basically asking for having half of the population hating it, which IS a bad idea and google will lose money on that.

  • """Fact check""" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RightSaidFred99 ( 874576 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @11:58PM (#53074213)

    This [snopes.com] is the type of fact checking they mean, I assume.

    They rate as "Mostly False" something where the only disputable fact is whether she "volunteered" for it, and it appears she didn't. Literally everything else in the little poster is demonstrably true, in fact they actually say the same thing below.

    Hillary Clinton volunteered to defend a rapist. False. OK, they're good there.

    Hillary Clinton alleged that the victim was lying/crazy. True. Snopes tries to be cute and claim that she's just repeating what some psychiatrist said, because.. you know.. defense lawyers never find an expert witness to say what they want. Sorry, fact is that Clinton accused the victim of being crazy. Sure, she used the "I have been told" weasel words, but as we know from Trumps similar tactic that means nothing. It's in the affidavit and she signed it.

    Hillary got the guy off a longer sentence, and laughed about it. True. Again, these are unarguable facts. You can certainly quibble over context, but the fact is that the guy got a reduced sentence, that she implied he was guilty, and that she laughed about said implication. All public record and undeniable.

    So tell me how that is "mostly false"? I might give them credit if they said "mixed" or "depends on context and interpretation". I can also see how even in the context of these facts you could say that none of it is a big deal, and that's a valid interpretation. But just "Mostly False"? No. It's isn't.

    • Hillary Clinton alleged that the victim was lying/crazy. True.

      Nope. Rather than asserting that claim, she asked for a psychiatric exam to find out:

      ...other people, including an expert in child psychology, had said that the complainant was "emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing about persons, claiming they had attacked her body," and that "children in early adolescence tend to exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences." Clinton therefore asked the court to have the complainant undergo a psychiatric exam (at the defense's expense) to determine the validity of that information:

      Hillary got the guy off a longer sentence, and laughed about it. True.

      Except it was the victim's mother who pushed for the plea deal:

      The victim says it was her mother, who had recently been abandoned by her husband, who pushed for a quick plea deal to avoid the humiliation of having her daughter testify in open court.

      And she didn't laugh about reducing his sentence either, but about how the evidence was presented:

      She did audibly laugh or chuckle at points, not about "knowing that the defendant was guilty" or "getting a guilty guy off" (which makes little sense, given that the defendant pled guilty) but rather while musing about how elements of the case that might ordinarily have supported the prosecution worked in the defendant's favor (i.e., observing that the defendant's passing a polygraph test had "forever destroyed her faith" in that technology)

      Context is everything, yes? If you boil it down too much, the meaning evaporates.

  • by bongey ( 974911 ) on Friday October 14, 2016 @12:27AM (#53074279)

    President Oboner showing of his 'Agent' as they call it double the views in 24 hours but is missing from the trending videos.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    Google is another clinton shill.

  • People aren't interested in facts unless it's to bolster their pre-existing need.
    Prime example: People hate immigrants, so every time there is a crime by an immigrant it gets all over the news. Statistics are cited that in a certain location crime has skyrocketed due to immigrants. So using cherrypicking of facts .. they are able to paint an image that all the immigrants are dangerous. They won't mention that overall murder and violent crime in the US has drastically reduced and is now at historic lows. Th

  • Politifact (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RoccamOccam ( 953524 ) on Friday October 14, 2016 @12:57AM (#53074345)

    "You (Hillary Clinton) get a subpoena, and after getting the subpoena you delete 33,000 emails." -- Donald Trump

    Politifact rates that a "Half-Truth" because (according to Politifact):

    Trump’s timeline is correct. The congressional subpoena came on March 4, 2015, and an employee deleted the emails sometime after March 25, 2015, three weeks later.

    However, the implication — that Clinton deleted emails relevant to the subpoena in order to avoid scrutiny — is unprovable if not flat wrong.

    The FBI’s investigation did find several thousand emails among those deleted that were work-related and should have been turned over to the State Department. However, FBI Director James Comey said in a July 2016 statement that the FBI investigation "found no evidence that any of the additional work-related emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them."

    That's absurd. First of all, you don't fact check on an implication, it was a very straight-forward statement of fact. Secondly, the FBI finding "no evidence" doesn't even prove the implication false.

    • Secondly, the FBI finding "no evidence" doesn't even prove the implication false.

      It proves that Trump was making statement WITHOUT evidence.
      I.e. He was either lying OR basing his statement on other people's lies. Either case - he was spreading falsehoods.

      Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - but it IS a proof that such a claim is nothing but unproven bullshit.

      • Re:Politifact (Score:4, Insightful)

        by RoccamOccam ( 953524 ) on Friday October 14, 2016 @07:44AM (#53075303)

        But he didn't make that claim. That was the inference of Politifact. They admitted that the claim was true, added their own inference, claimed that their own inference was false (on the basis of missing evidence, which means that their own inference was simply "unproven") and then somehow assess the original claim as "half true".

        Using that approach, any statement can be assessed as "half true".

  • by phrackthat ( 2602661 ) on Saturday October 15, 2016 @11:55AM (#53081623)
    Obama came out with comments on the same day [redstate.com] that seem to relate directly to this initiative by Google -- where he advanced a kind of Orwellian mechanism for determining "truthiness" regarding the information that people found on the internet:

    THE PRESIDENT: If I had the perfect answer to that, then I’d run for President. (Laughter.) Look, this takes us a little bit far afield, but I do think that it’s relevant to the scientific community, it’s relevant to our democracy, citizenship. We’re going to have to rebuild, within this Wild, Wild West of information flow, some sort of curating function that people agree to.

    I use the analogy in politics -- it used to be there were three television stations and Walter Cronkite is on there and not everybody agreed, and there were always outliers who thought that it was all propaganda, and we didn’t really land on the Moon, and Elvis is still alive, and so forth. (Laughter.) But, generally, that was in the papers that you bought at the supermarket right as you were checking out. And generally, people trusted a basic body of information.

    It wasn’t always as democratic as it should have been. And Zoe is exactly right that -- for example, on something like climate change, we’ve actually been doing some interesting initiatives where we’re essentially deputizing citizens with hand-held technologies to start recording information that then gets pooled -- they’re becoming scientists without getting the PhD. And we can do that in a lot of other fields as well.

    But there has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.

    And that’s hard to do, but I think it’s going to be necessary, it’s going to be possible. I think the answer is obviously not censorship, but it’s creating places where people can say, this is reliable and I’m still able to argue about -- safely -- about facts and what we should do about it while still -- not just making stuff up.

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