The ongoing fight against the rise of fake news has seen several tech giants resolve to stricter measures and Google is also doing the same.
As part of the ongoing fight, the search giant has now elected to include websites that are not hiding the truth about about their country of origin. In an update to its Google News guidelines, the company says that it will forbid websites that “misrepresent or conceal their country of origin.” This will also include those websites that are targeting people in a different country “under false premises.” In short, if there’s a Russian or North Korean website trying to pose as an American news channel, it won’t show up in your news results.
According to Bloomberg, this is a matter of adaptation where Google has to regularly update its policies so that they “reflect a constantly changing web and how people look for information online.” The result of this is that people will be able to “understand and see where their news online is coming from and that sites are being transparent about their origins.”
We all know what Russia allegedly did as far as the 2016 US presidential election is concerned. In a bid to fight such incidences, Google has been facing more pressure from lawmakers who want the search giant to implement stricter measures aimed at cracking down on fake websites. By cracking down on websites that are cheating about their origin and not just those that have fake content, the search giant may just have stepped up the fight against fake news.
One major hurdle, though, is whether Google will still be able to effectively identify these websites that are hiding their home country and act on them before they eventually become news.