FAKE NEWS: the catch-cry of a generation. How could anyone have known that this little phrase, first used to describe the deliberate spread of misinformation that dogged the 2016 US election, would become such a plague upon our ears?
Unreliable and unverified news stories have been circulating with such wild abandon and such serious consequences, we even did a bloody Q&A on it a few weeks ago.
And let’s not disregard the fact that it’s now become synonymous – at least for certain prominent American politicians – with news that is unflattering or otherwise inconvenient, which only further confuses things (and Pete Evans).
There have been a few pushes to address the issue, including Facebook‘s widely-publicised crackdown on fake articles circulating on the platform.
But now Google, search engine behemoth and tool of choice for all fringe-dwellling fact-averse citizens of this good flat Earth, has launched a fact-checking feature. It is… pretty cool.
The feature is designed to introduce some shred of reality back into the bullshit-heavy clamour of contradictory information that we’ve become so used to on the wide, wide world of web. While it was first rolled out in Google US & UK news results, it’s now gone global and general, meaning fact-check snippets appear on regular search results for certain terms – like, for example, “Donald Trump murder rate”:
“Hillary Clinton Iran“
“Is Barack Obama Muslim“
And so on.
Google doesn’t do the fact-checking themselves – they leave that to the experts, like PolitiFact and Snopes.
Of course, you can’t please everybody:
Source: The Guardian.
Image: YouTube.
