Google highlights fact-checking while Bing SERP found to be disinformation hotbed
0Reported today on Search Engine Land
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Google highlights fact-checking while Bing SERP found to be disinformation hotbed
Fake news, deceptive content, and disinformation will continue to be major, contentious issues as we head into the 2020 election next year. Following heavy criticism in the wake of the 2016 election, both Facebook and Google initiated fact-checking efforts to help identify falsehoods in news content (although Facebook's political ads policy has been thought to confuse free speech and disinformation).
Obviously, there's still a long way to go to protect people from efforts to manipulate them with willfully false information online. This morning, Google is highlighting its own fact-checking efforts in News and Search, while a new report calls out Bing as a hotbed of misinformation and disinformation.
Google touts expanding fact-checking. The company said that "fact checks appear more than 11 million times a day in Search results globally and in Google News in five countries (Brazil, France, India, U.K. and U.S.). There's also a dedicated search tool for fact checking that anyone can access.
Google also says that it's working with a variety of organizations to provide more "context" for people to help them evaluate content in Google News or in Search results. The company illustrates this with an example from a search result for the query "did vaccines cause measles outbreak in Samoa."
Google fact-checking markup in the SERP
The result, which is relatively far down the page, indicates that the story is "false" and has been checked by AFP. Users can click-through to the AFP fact check for themselves. Google goes on to say in its blog post that it's trying to find "new models to support the long-term sustainability of the fact-checking fi