
Expanding Fact Checking at Google - mpweiher
https://www.blog.google/topics/journalism-news/expanding-fact-checking-google/
======
ssharp
Nearly all fact-checking organizations are considered to be biased and
untrustworthy by a sizable percentage of the population. I'm skeptical that
this will actually lead to change in people's critical thinking as applied to
processing news and news sources.

A recent poll showed that more Americans trusted Donald Trump, someone who has
not gone a day in his short tenure in office without him or someone on his
staff telling a verifiable lie to the press, to tell them the truth compared
to the U.S. media.

~~~
empath75
There are about 30% of the population that are totally ignorant not just about
facts but about how to even ascertain what the truth is. I'm not sure we
should throw up our hands and give up because a sizable percentage of people
are hopeless. There are a lot of people who can be helped by that kind of
thing.

~~~
tlrobinson
It's a little ironic you made up a statistic about how people are ignorant
about facts...

~~~
dleslie
It's a lovely round number and suitably situated in a comfortable minority
position; it's thus inoffensive, aesthetically pleasing, relatively benign and
allows one to feel reasonably smug when repeating it. Seems to be factual to
me!

;)

------
dingo_bat
Bad move. A search engine should not be valuing certain websites more just
because they proclaim to be "fact checkers". For example, politifact is
usually trusty but some of their judgements are highly questionable. But
Google will trust them and display their link prominently, even when it might
be total bullshit.

~~~
jayrox
I try to keep my facts in check, any examples of questionable politifact
judgements?

~~~
stvswn
Here you
go:[https://www.google.com/amp/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/politifa...](https://www.google.com/amp/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/politifact8217s-forked-
tongue-1386964961) ,and this
one:[http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/414434/politifact-
and-m...](http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/414434/politifact-and-me-kevin-
d-williamson)

~~~
Bahamut
Can't read the first source, but the National Review should never be cited as
a legitimate source (the second link). It also reads like an almost raving
rant...

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I've seen excellent articles in National Review from time to time. I'm not a
regular reader by any means, but a blanket statement like this isn't useful.
It leans conservative, but it's also pretty upfront about that fact.

~~~
Strang
It doesn't just "lean conservative," it is an explicitly conservative opinion
journal, and an excellent one. Even if you are not a conservative, it's a
great source for understanding conservative thought.

------
avar
How will a system like this handle developing news stories after the fact?
E.g. in the Québec mosque shooting there were initially two suspects, and many
news articles that had accurate information at the time look incorrect in
retrospect. Would those all be marked as BS retroactively by such a system, or
is it enough that the news article used the best available facts at the time?

How will it handle granularity? It's very hard to write any news article
that's 100% correct about everything. Will the entire article be marked as
non-factually accurate due to the slightest mistake, or will they be
highlighting specific factual inaccuracies in the content itself?

~~~
skylan_q
Cheap labor. There's plenty out there. Google will tell them what the facts
are and they'll promote/hide stories based on truthiness.

~~~
skylan_q
Google was good. Then Google was bad. Then the Democrats lost the election and
Google was good again.

~~~
icebraining
Even terrible people and organizations can be smeared. Whether Google is good
or not is irrelevant to whether your particular accusation is baseless.

As I pointed above, it doesn't seem like Google is even marking stuff has
"checked", but marking articles as being themselves "fact checks".

~~~
skylan_q
_Whether Google is good or not is irrelevant to whether your particular
accusation is baseless._

The perception of whether Google is good or not is all that matters. This is
how media and mass psychology works. This isn't about fact-checking stories.
It's about using Google's brand to deem specific stories to be real or fake.

~~~
icebraining
But that's not what they're doing! Did you read my whole post? They are _not_
marking articles as checked, they are just tagging them as being Fact Check
_ing_ articles.

~~~
skylan_q
And what's the difference?

~~~
icebraining
The difference is that it's not a evaluation about whether the content is
correct, just about the type of content. It's akin to marking links as "PDF"
or "Video".

------
eplanit
It's almost funny how the underlying premise is ignored: that there is really
no such thing as "news" in terms of the information we consume -- all these
sources are just a segment of the Entertainment industry. So-called News
organizations make their money the same way a game show does: advertising.
There is no built-in economic reward for being a great truth-teller. Attract
more eyeballs and you make more in advertising, period. Especially in these
days of so many forms/channels of communications, this all promotes echo
chambers of bias, which is sad but true.

The idea of automated "fact checking" should be sending chills down
everybody's spine.

------
_yosefk
Wasn't the whole point of Google replacing things like Yahoo directories,
curated manually, with fully automated algorithms? Being able to find quality
information on "Bill Clinton" algorithmically and not settle for the page
"Bill Clinton Sucks" as their early paper discussed? And aren't we in the age
of AI, everything is solved even more now with NNs than it was with PageRank?

Why then prop up human-chosen sources like snopes and politifact? Is the AI
too dumb or does it hold the wrong political opinions?

~~~
gerbilly
>Why then prop up human-chosen sources like snopes and politifact? Is the AI
too dumb or does it hold the wrong political opinions?

There's not much AI behind it.

I mean it's more complicated than that but a page's rank is based on number of
incoming links.

What's interesting is that the net seems to be partitioning along various
demographic lines: rural/urban, left/right etc, each creating their own
subspace of 'credible' sites based on the pagerank algorithm.

In fact it's a self reinforcing cycle because of personalized searches. Once
google gathers enough information about you based on your search history it
will present you with results tailored to your opinions and tastes.

It's unfortunate because in the 90s we talked about the web breaking down
barriers, but in some cases it's walling people in. Sometime in obvious ways
like with actual walled gardens like facebook, but also in more insidious ways
such as personalized searching.

~~~
_yosefk
You mean the great advances in Deep Learning we keep reading about did not
revolutionize search? Still PageRank?

------
netcraft
I feel like this is something that maybe should be handled outside of search
engines / aggregators themselves. I'm imagining some sort of community around
a browser extension - the ability to vote for tags / add comments to any url,
using the extension would allow you to see what others think. Would need
moderation and would have to really get a critical mass before it would be
useful. Perhaps the ability to have multiple "communities" you subscribe to
with their own groups and ratings e.g. the "Fact Checkers" community rates
this article one way, the "Reddit Politics" community rates it a bit
differently, etc.

~~~
MaxfordAndSons
Some sort of community around a browser extension you say?

Check out [https://hypothes.is/](https://hypothes.is/) it's a project to allow
universal annotation of web content, which could conceivably enable just such
a process of decentralized, community-moderated fact checking. Wouldn't that
be nice! Of course, given what's happening on Wikipedia lately, I'm not
totally convinced it could work, but hey, at least someone's trying.

~~~
netcraft
very cool, thank you for pointing this out. I want to play with it some more,
but I think one of the things that isnt fully thought out is that some url's
will inherently change over time - the front page of the NYT for instance
shows comments from over a year ago that obviously don't apply now - even
comments from an hour ago may reference content that is no longer there. I
don't have an answer for the problem but its something thats got to be thought
about. Similar problem would be canonicalization of urls.

------
wu-ikkyu
Introducing TaaS: Truth as a Service. Brought to you by your omniscient
Corporate Overlords. Because you're not smart enough to find the Truth for
yourself!

------
rokosbasilisk
Whoa. I have a bad feeling this will lead to antitrust suits.

Its highly suspicious its launching in france and germany while their populist
movements are growing.

~~~
u_wot_m8
There's tape of Merkel telling Zuckerberg to censor migrant crimes on
Facebook.

~~~
dagw
Imagine how much more persuasive this comment would have been if you'd just
taken a few more seconds add and hand full of links to provide evidence and
context to your statement.

~~~
spiderfarmer
Zuckerberg was talking about his opinion that "hate speech" doesn't have a
place on Facebook and that they "need to do some work".

Merkel merely asked "are you working on this"?

Somehow Infowars turned this into the following headline:

"Mark Zuckerberg Caught on Hot Mic Saying Facebook Will Censor Anti-Migrant
Posts"

Other, more credible outlets said that Merkel was "pressing" Zuckerberg. Like
asking a question puts so much pressure on someone.

I for one would like to see headlines like this rewritten, "Saved you a click"
style. People often read nothing more than the headline.

Words matter.

~~~
RyanZAG
Ignoring the blatant lies by Infowars, this still seems pretty bad. Giving
Zuckerberg the power to identify "hate speech" and work with politicians on it
can only lead to abuse in the long run.

~~~
soundwave106
I'm not a fan of hate speech laws personally as a general concept, but Germany
does have some pretty strong laws on their books regarding hate speech
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung)).
So Zuckerberg may not really have a choice here
([https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/technology/facebook-
germa...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/technology/facebook-germany-hate-
speech-fake-news.html)).

~~~
spiderfarmer
In The Netherlands we have these rules as well. It's forbidden to publicly
offend _groups_ of people because of their race, faith, sex or handicap (art.
137c). It's also forbidden to encourage racism, hate or violence (art. 137d)
and to publish or even possess publications that do so (art. 137e).

------
dogma1138
Am I the only one who doesnt want Google to fact check the news?

Like yes propaganda is a problem but so is the ministery of truth.

Fake news stories have always existed the problem now is that we don't get
news anymore we get policy driven editorials.

Fixing fake news is a red herring I much rather get opinion pieces and
corrected speech out of prime time news.

But that's what you get for decades or people being offended by factual
headlines.

------
fcg221
I thought that this article might be about fact-checking the excerpts from web
sites that Google sometimes presents as an answer to a Google search. One
egregious instance of such a result that needs fact-checking is for the search
"Is Donald Trump a citizen?"[1], for which this featured snippet appears at
the top:

    
    
        Donald Trump is NOT Natural Born. Donald John Trump, Senior,
        was born in Queens, New York on June 14, 1946. He presents
        himself as a person eligible to the Office of President of
        the United States, yet, he does not have the parentage
        necessary to be a "natural born citizen."
        
        Donald Trump - NOT Natural Born - Natural born, The National Society ...
        natural-borncitizens.com/donaldtrumpnotnaturalborn.html
    

I doubt that Google wishes to represent this excerpt, from a website whose
views are on the fringe (to say the least) as fact. Perhaps Google should be
more careful about automatically displaying snippets pulled from websites as
fact.

[1]
[https://google.com/search?q=Is+Donald+Trump+a+citizen](https://google.com/search?q=Is+Donald+Trump+a+citizen)?

~~~
chimeracoder
Similarly, as recently as a couple of months ago, searching "Firefox" in
Google yielded an ad for a malware site masquerading as Mozilla.

Google does make some effort to prevent these, but it's clearly not enough -
that particular example happened for literally years.

------
madmaniak
Fact Checking is a new word for censorship.

~~~
maxerickson
How dare they make a business decision to have standards for accuracy on their
platform.

The nerve of giant corporations in our corporatist world!

The nerve!

~~~
leereeves
Censorship is often hidden behind innocuous phrases like "standards for
accuracy".

It was fairly obvious when the media started talking about "fake news online"
that the endgame was censoring the Internet.

~~~
maxerickson
Yeah, totally obvious.

Robust freedom of speech doesn't mean that idiots get to have an equal voice.
In fact, I think it depends on idiots quickly getting ignored, even in vile,
pernicious, institutionalized ways.

~~~
leereeves
So you're arguing in favor of censorship?

Who decides who gets ignored in "vile, pernicious, institutionalized ways"?

~~~
maxerickson
Let me know when it becomes illegal to start up a news aggregator.

Until then, it's whoever makes better news aggregators.

~~~
leereeves
'Better' meaning?

Popular? Then you're deciding truth by popularity.

~~~
maxerickson
And?

The alternative is to ban sorting news articles at all.

~~~
leereeves
And you'll end up with a liberal echo chamber and a conservative echo chamber,
and never the two sides shall read the same story.

~~~
maxerickson
Maybe. In the US I think the more partisan media operations are pandering at
least as much as they are influencing (I guess probably quite a bit more). The
opinion bubble exists whether they sell ad space on it or not, they have some
effect of making it bigger.

There's also the fun problem where the sorting and other display choices of a
news aggregator are speech. Why should that speech be suppressed?

------
facetube
How about showing the country of record from WHOIS? Most of the severe
offenders I saw in 2016 were e.g. Washington Post knockoffs using a Panama
"WHOIS guard" mailing address, or sites that were literally registered to a
street address in Macedonia (e.g. usapoliticszone.com). These are the sorts of
sites that were tricking Trump devotees en masse in private groups (on
Facebook and across the broader internet).

Surely having a real mailing address listed in WHOIS isn't too much to ask for
a news organization? Google performs real verification on mailing addresses of
Maps business listings – the technical infrastructure to hard-verify WHOIS
mailing addresses seems to already exist.

------
UnoriginalGuy
This presents an issue that we've seen a lot of this political season...

Anonymous sources, how do you "fact check" them? This season has been full of
supposed leaks from the FBI, White House staffers, intelligence community,
DOJ, and beyond. But a single publication claiming something with an anonymous
source isn't fact check-able. Then what you see is second publications posting
the same story (particularly dedicated political sites like Politico/The Hill)
but their only source is the first publication. Then a third publication runs
it only saying that X Y and Z reported the story, implying that it is true
just by virtue of the level of attention.

Everyone is talking about "alt news" (typically far right news) which is
legitimately problematic, but few have been discussing the problematic way
anonymous sources have been used and reported. It isn't too dissimilar from
this XKCD except replace Wikipedia with third tier publications and
broadcasters[0]. You can seemingly get a story verified just by repeating it
enough, that's a problem.

[0] [https://xkcd.com/978/](https://xkcd.com/978/)

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Anonymous sources, how do you "fact check" them?_

Reputation.

Some journals, and some reporters, have earned my benefit of doubt. They tend
to be--where I've been able to verify--direct to their anonymous sources and
do everything in their power to verify what was said. This process takes
effort, for the journalist and the reader.

~~~
pluma
Except then nonsense like the "PewDiePie is a nazi" articles happens
(originally WSJ but then propagated by other "reputable" newspapers) and it
becomes obvious even "trustworthy" sources aren't reliable.

All media is biased because all media is gathered and edited by biased people
(or as I like to call them: people). The only thing fact checking can help
cutting down on is actual fake news -- hoaxes and blatantly obvious lies.

The "fake news" label however is applied so broadly now that you can have two
contrasting reports standing side by side calling each other fake news when
neither side is able to report on the full picture and both sides skew the few
factoids they have in accordance with their biases or use inflammatory
language.

I have yet to see a journal or reporter who consistently reports facts as
presented while checking for authenticity and motive. It seems like certain
organisations have learned that they can bypass a lot of accountability by
"leaking" information anonymously rather than using official press releases
(e.g. the "intelligence" sources during the late stages of the presidential
election campaigning, none of which any agency seems to consider worth hunting
down as a security risk like any of the real "leakers" before).

The closest I've seen is a constant chorus of "we don't know the specifics
yet", which predictably doesn't perform well when competing with "news"
sources that just forward unsubstantiated tweets and anonymous "eyewitness
accounts".

~~~
dagw
_Except then nonsense like the "PewDiePie is a nazi" articles happens_

At the risk of getting very meta here in a discussion about trustworthiness. I
cannot find any article on the WSJ site where they claimed that "PewDiePie is
a nazi". Could you please provide a link?

~~~
pluma
Since their original article is paywalled and has been edited since, I can't
find a direct quote calling him a nazi and I'm sure they didn't literally use
those three words like that.

The oldest snapshot[0] on archive.org indicates the article's subheading as
"Star with most subscribers posted videos in which he makes anti-Semitic jokes
or content, testing media firm’s standards" which they later changed to "Move
came after the Journal asked about videos in which he included anti-Semitic
jokes or Nazi imagery".

The accompanying video[1] deliberately took a lot of sequences out of context
and presented them as representative. Regardless of the validity of the
Souther Poverty Law Center quotes[2] they deliberately suggest he is a nazi by
association, especially by ending the video with the implication that The
Daily Stormer (a nazi website) likes him.

Ironically The Daily Stormer has since changed its tagline from "the world's
#1 PewDiePie fan site" to "the world's #1 Wall Street Journal fan site", with
a composite image of the three journalists that wrote the WSJ hit piece on
PewDiePie.

The WSJ presents the entire story as investigatory journalism (the WaPo[3]
even calls it "investigatory") with all the characteristic window dressing
like the haunting steel drum soundtrack and creepy transitions to soundbites.
It includes an apology and follows it up with a SPLC quote suggesting the
apology itself is just a nazi dogwhistle.

I would be far more forgiving if the entire ordeal didn't give off such a
strong "old media vs new media" vibe. PewDiePie became popular with probably
the most mundane and inoffensive content (gameplay videos with quirky humour)
before recently shifting into more daring content, much of which is built on
him calling out his critics. A lot of the nazi/anti-semitism segments the WSJ
cites are actually retorts to people accusing him of these exact things and
can be summarised as "Look, this is what you say I am: <nazi segment>. This is
ridiculous".

I don't care much for PewDiePie's style of content, neither the old gameplay
stuff nor the more recent videos. And his humour is definitely playing with
societal sensibilities and at times in bad taste. But the anti-semitism
accusations are willfully ignorant of the context and no more valid than the
child abuse accusations against Louis CK.

Regardless of whether PewDiePie is an anti-semite/nazi or not, the style of
reporting by the WSJ, WaPo, Guardian et al is sensationalist and
intellectually dishonest. It calls into question their credibility on topics
that actually matter, which is a net negative to the credibility of the
traditional press as a whole.

[0]:
[http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.wsj.com/articles/di...](http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.wsj.com/articles/disney-
severs-ties-with-youtube-star-pewdiepie-after-anti-semitic-posts-1487034533)

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFY7mGkmFxo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFY7mGkmFxo)

[2]: While frequently cited because it's ostensibly "good people" the SPLC has
also called Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz as "anti-Muslim extremist" (which
almost everyone else seems to agree on being ridiculous and irresponsible).
Appealing to their moral authority should thus be taken with a grain of salt.

[3]: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2017/02/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2017/02/14/pewdiepie-youtubes-most-popular-star-dropped-by-disney-over-
anti-semitic-jokes/)

------
cnnsucks
Google News...

I follow events in Venezuela. I routinely see teleSUR garbage (Chavista's
Pravda) mixed in with credible reporting on Google news. And not just the
benign news these state organs always conflate with their agenda pieces; the
pure Bolvarian conspiratorial left-wing dreck stuff is there too, offered as
"news" by Google News. Been seeing this for years.

One guess whether teleSUR propaganda is going to suffer any "fact checking"
downmods as a result of Google's sudden desire to protect us all from Trumpian
untruths.

------
caseysoftware
Google used to be about "organizing the world's information."

It's disappointing to see they've become "organizing the world's information
that we want you to see."

------
wallace_f
Assaults on free speech always come with arguments of moral righteousness.

A service to the public needs to actually credibly serve the public. A bakery
cannot refuse to cater a wedding, ever if they find the clients repulsive
because they are two dudes, or whatever reason they have. Google should not be
permitted to discriminate or censor search results, even if they find the
clients repulsive because they are 4chan users, or whatever reason they have.

~~~
widdma
> Google should not be prohibited to discriminate or censor search
> results[...]

You're right, filtering results would be a concerning step. I guess this is
why they've added a fact check tag rather than a filter. I think it's a good
solution.

But then again, free speech doesn't mean you have the right to have your
results shown on the first page of Google. If they change their algorithm to
preference articles with fact checking, is it the same as someone refusing to
make a wedding cake for two dudes?

~~~
wallace_f
I know, I just used the 4chan example because it's an example of censorship
that they're already doing. I haven't gone through to check the legitimacy of
Google's fact checking efforts although I have a feel it's going to be awful.

------
daxfohl
I'm curious whether there is a correlation between people's political
affiliation and their likelihood to _use_ fact checking services.

~~~
hueving
It likely changes with the party in control (i.e. members of the party in
control won't spend much effort fact checking their own and fact checking a
minority group doesn't matter much).

------
EGreg
I think The goal shouldn't be to detect fake news. The goal should be to
detect whether a specific claim is true or false. For that, you simply need a
site, like a crowd sourced fact checking sites, where people are required to
source their arguments precisely, unlike fake news which doesn't. Then you
have a resource to turn to, similarly to how fact checkers are used in the
face of fake news. After that, you can build an engine to crawl news articles
or have them submitted, and detect the claims being made. Those claims can be
either auto-matched to existing ones or create new ones (deduplication) and
then the site has a fresh new stream of claims to fact check. StackOverflow
could build this site on their existing engine. If someone here knows them,
can you reply and put me in touch?

------
dukeluke
What is to keep these fact checking organizations free from manipulation &
spreading g propaganda? Will Google use this feature to further their own
interests alone? If the answer to that is 'no,' how can we be sure they won't?

~~~
bnolsen
Considering the fake news movement is itself in large part propaganda google
has chosen sides in this already and absolutely shouldn't be trusted.

~~~
curt15
Pizzagate is a pretty classic example of "fake news". How is criticism of it
in any way "propaganda"?

~~~
rfrank
There's been over 1500 pedophilia and sex trafficking arrests since Trump took
office. It may be less fake than you think.

------
tlrobinson
I'd much prefer if Google let me opt in to the fact checking organizations I
trust.

Of course then some idiots will pick Infowars as their fact checker.

------
ksk
I think this is going down the wrong path. I would not trust an advertising
company to fact check, or even link to fact checking tools.

------
chrramirez
This kind of actions are important now more than ever for western societies.
We have to remember that Russia is committed to destroy democratic
institutions using fake news as one of its tools. Using fake news is an old
trick to distort reality. In the pass it was done controlling state media or a
good part of it. Now is making it into your Facebook feed.

------
grenoire
Does anybody have any examples on how fact checking is automated?

Is it a mix of natural language processing and database cross-checks?

~~~
kuro-kuris
I reckon they use a mix of NLP and ontologies.

------
paganel
Wish this was up and running back in 2003, when the invasion of Iraq started
based on fabricated evidence on WMD.

~~~
will_pseudonym
If it was up and running back in 2003, the fact checkers would have been
saying that there _were_ WMD's in Iraq.

~~~
knowaveragejoe
That's doubtful. My understanding is that most bodies outside of the special
pentagon task force established by the WH at the time were skeptical.

------
kabes
But a lot of news around elections is about predictions of the future which
you can't really fact-check. A lot of other news these days is in the form of
'opinions', which you also have to accept for what they are.

------
godzillabrennus
So few companies have so much power with generating and spreading information.

This is a good time for the industry to organize a new open and transparent
Wikileaks style organization to make the decisions on what's fake or not.

~~~
grenoire
Then who monitors the monitoring organisation? A centralised solution to
information oligopolies cannot work.

------
mattlevan
Expanding fact checking at Google?

Fine.

DuckDuckGo[1] it is for me, then.

[1] [https://duckduckgo.com/about](https://duckduckgo.com/about)

------
samdoidge
What would a fact checker say about Iraq & WMDs prior to the US invasion?

------
losteverything
I'll decide what I'll believe and what is fact. Not an algorithm or search
engine.

It seems like Google is trying to make the old statement " its printed it must
be true" new. "Its fact check on Google it must be true."

The joy of reading online is coming under attack.

------
lenovouser
1984 here we come. Was nice playing with you, humans - until next time! Oh,
there is no next time? Well...

------
username3
Instead of fact checking, they should show opinions from every side of issues
across the spectrum.

~~~
kazagistar
Opinions and facts are distinct. Opinions separate out into categories of
"agree", "disagree", "don't care", etc. Facts separate out into very different
categories of "true", "untrue", "unsubstantiated either way", etc.

Yes, its good to be exposed to a broad spectrum of opinions. Yes, different
sources can select different true facts to push an agenda and substantiate
their own cause, and it is thus important to get true facts from multiple
sources to get a complete picture. No, it is not a good idea to put
unsubstantiated "facts" or outright untruths on equal footing as the truth.

~~~
username3
You have to put all "facts" out there to show they are untrue. Who determines
the "facts"? Conspiracy theorists get confirmation bias when you ignore them.

Facts are not hard to check. No one knows when and why fact checkers disagree.
Fact checkers can't check intentions of a speaker nor do they follow up.

