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

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.

Comments

Yeah. Right

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Yeah. Right

[Nehmo]

Or are you one of those gullible people who believe that the media is biased against Trump despite the media actually greatly assistingTrump's campaign by repeating every damn stupid thing that he says? He'd never have made it through the primaries if the mainstream media weren't so obsessed with him.

They unconsciously assisted Trump. They were competing with each other for viewership. The media didn't believe its own adage, "Any news is good news" because it gives name recognition. Now, the main news outlets, and even Google search results, clearly favor Hillary.

It's the same stuff every day: Everybody is SO Appalled by ______ (insert modified v of what he actually said) that Trump said.; Clinton is (destroying, crushing, obliterating, overwhelming) Trump in popularity.

Just look at tomorrow's lead stories. That's what they will say.

This, btw, is why you should vote against Hillary. At least Trump will have a hostile press.

Re:Yeah. Right

[hairyfeet]

Riiight, will those "facts" include the fact that Google was caught rigging search results to be Pro Clinton? Or how about the fact that Eric Schmidt is working for the Clinton Campaign? How about the fact that Google has a meeting a week with the Obama administration?

Re:Yeah. Right

[jafiwam]

Or are you one of those gullible people who believe that the media is biased against Trump despite the media actually greatly assistingTrump's campaign by repeating every damn stupid thing that he says? He'd never have made it through the primaries if the mainstream media weren't so obsessed with him.

They unconsciously assisted Trump. They were competing with each other for viewership. The media didn't believe its own adage, "Any news is good news" because it gives name recognition. Now, the main news outlets, and even Google search results, clearly favor Hillary.

It's the same stuff every day: Everybody is SO Appalled by ______ (insert modified v of what he actually said) that Trump said.; Clinton is (destroying, crushing, obliterating, overwhelming) Trump in popularity.

Just look at tomorrow's lead stories. That's what they will say.

This, btw, is why you should vote against Hillary. At least Trump will have a hostile press.

The part I'd like to know is when did "the news" become 24/7 instructions on what to think and feel about things.

Try it, just consume whatever news you do, and take note of the time they spend on "the what" verses the time they spend telling you what to think and feel. "You will be shocked!" No. Dude. A responsible and intelligent (not to mention wise) person decides that stuff for themselves. YOUR job as a "journalist" (in quotes, because there aren't any anymore) is to find information, collate it into useful form, and present it.

Re:Yeah. Right

[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?

Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

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"

OK but misses a larger problem

[CQDX]

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.

Re:OK but misses a larger problem

[meta-monkey]

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.

Re:OK but misses a larger problem

[Swave An deBwoner]

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:OK but misses a larger problem

[Jack9]

How different were things last year?

Re:OK but misses a larger problem

[PopeRatzo]

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.

Re: OK but misses a larger problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Or women could stop carrying on like sexual assualt is the only crime mankind needs to address, and stop having such a sensitive trigger.

OMG he looked in my vague direction! Help! Police! Sexual assualt.

Half the time it's insecure women who are just crying out to convince the world they are desirable by pretending some random guy desired them inappropriately.

Re: OK but misses a larger problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Your worldview depends on snopes. You might want to do something about that.

Re:OK but misses a larger problem

[Orgasmatron]

Oh wow. Snopes calls it "Mostly False" because some of the ancillary details aren't right. Stop the fucking presses! Someone tell the New York Times that snopes is choking on Hillary's dick again!

Also newsworthy, Politifact studiously avoided learning any details of the case that might contradict the headline they assigned to it in advance. Consider this one example:

She is "discussing the crime lab's accidental destruction of DNA evidence that tied (the accused man, Thomas Alfred) Taylor to the crime." Destruction that led the prosecution to seek a plea deal on a lesser charge, according to the article.

Which crime lab destroyed the evidence? Her crime lab destroyed the evidence. The state crime lab had a match already and handed the intact evidence over to the defense, which promptly destroyed it. Then, in a move that only a lawyer could love, the defense asked that the key evidence be thrown out because after destroying it, they were unable to verify the state lab's conclusion.

And did you catch the extreme spin they put on the polygraph statement? Every human on the planet that understands English and is more than about 5 years old understood exactly what she meant. But not snopes! Nope, snopes spun that into a general laugh about the polygraph supporting the defense instead of the prosecution, because Hillary, with her extensive first-case-ever experience "knew" that the polygraph usually helps the prosecutor. That sounds like a good reason to laugh about losing all faith in polygraphs. Right? Right?

Snopes and politifact are Marxist political opinion sites that only pretend to be interested in facts. (We can add Google to that list.) No one but fellow Marxists actually believes them any more. You remember the one where Trump and Sanders both quoted the same figure for black youth unemployment and they scored the Sanders one true and the Trump one false? Classic.

Oh, and mustn't forget NBC. New to this game, but catching up fast.

But good work ignoring the bulk of my post to concentrate on the one tiny part that you imagined you already had a good answer to.

Re:OK but misses a larger problem

[Orgasmatron]

I'm always very careful to avoid criticizing her for defending the guy. It is indeed a lawyer's job and ethical duty to defend their client.

That duty has limits though. The lawyer is not to lie or use defenses that they know to be false. The lawyer is not to participate in the destruction of evidence. I'm not sure about the professional standards of the day, but attacking the character of a 12 year old girl and accusing her of "wanting" an older man to rape her into a coma seems sketchy to me.

And if that lawyer has a soul, I sure as fuck don't want to hear her cackling about the case a few years later.

I know lawyers, including a few full time public defenders. To be a full time public defender requires an extreme belief in the system, because they are paid peanuts for working 60+ hour weeks carrying a caseload that would kill two regular lawyers. Even those true believers struggle at times with the morality of it all, and they stay well clear of the unethical behavior that seems to define Hillary Clinton's life. They don't laugh about these hard cases. They cry.

Re:OK but misses a larger problem

[meta-monkey]

Which is why we need chaperones. Rich, powerful men are always gonna grab the pussy. An awful lot of women are gold digging whores who let them grab the pussy, because that's how they get gold. Some frigid dykes, though, get all pissy about it and scream "sexual harrrrraaaaaaaaaassment!" But they can't even be reliably counted on to cry about it the century it happens so we can pretend to care before they turn into wrinkled old hags. They're attention-seeking bitches, too, and they gotta save it up until just right for maximum attention-seeking potential. Then they'll go on Anderson Cooper and smile through the whole fucking interview about it.

So, are you going to:

1) Teach rich powerful men not to grab the pussy?

2) Teach gold digging whores not to like it?

3) Teach frigid dykes to cry about it faster?

I'm guessing none of these things. So we're back to reality: the sexual revolution failed. Bring back chaperones and don't let men and women who aren't related or married (or both!) to each other be alone together.

here's how it works

[Anonymous Coward]

if source == clinton {
      fact = 1
} else {
      fact = 0
}

Re:Commonly accepted criteria for fact checking

[Namarrgon]

And thus the campaign against objective reality continues. It's exactly this blanket dismissal of factual sources that's created such fertile ground for the mud-slinging loonies on both sides.

Re:Oh Goody

[meta-monkey]

But who fact checks the fact checkers?

who owns the media, who owns the facts

[Anonymous Coward]

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

captcha: industry

Re:If it's like Politifake, expect far left bias.

[Jack9]

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.

Re:But can this be fact checked?

[sittingnut]

with bloody war criminal scumbag like jared cohen working for google, they have serious credibility issues when it comes to news bias.

"""Fact check"""

[RightSaidFred99]

This 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.

Politifact

[RoccamOccam]

"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.

Re:Politifact

[RoccamOccam]

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".

Re: Expect conservative meltdown.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's only tens of thousands of individual documents on wikileaks and public record proving Hillary and company lying and conspiring against everything and everyone but them selves. But Trumps the liar. Thank you for correcting the record.

Re: Expect conservative meltdown.

[Entrope]

"There was no classified information on that server. None."
"It was not classified at the time."
"It was not marked classified."
"I relied on others to properly handle classified information."

Should I continue? Perhaps on transparency, or bribes, or when we should trust rape accusers?

Re:You do, obviously

[meta-monkey]

The problem is they're really just propaganda and get cited as if they're authority.

Jeb Bush: "My name is Jeb Bush."

Politificat: "Pants on fire! His real name is John Ellis Bush."

When Snopes gets political they do the stawman thing. If you make Claim A, they'll restate your claim as B, which is similar to A but not actually A, then debunk B calling it "mostly false," and then at the end say "what's actually true is A..." But all the casual observer sees is that you're a liar making mostly false claims, even though your claim was entirely true.