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

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh look it's a Politifact shill. Totally not biased! Much neutral!

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?

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"

Eric Schmidt is a giant Hillary Supporter

[Crashmarik]

https://www.bing.com/search?q=...

Hell the man built a company just to help Hillary (search for Hillary, Eric Schmidt, Groundgame)

So just who is going to be able to fact check Google's already established bias ?
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
http://dailycaller.com/2016/09...

I think I am going to start rotating search engines. Variety is likely for the best.

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:OK but misses a larger problem

[Anonymous Coward]

https://i.sli.mg/iBUuJ9.png
https://i.sli.mg/jbe6G3.png
https://i.sli.mg/2jvEeE.jpg

nothing fishy at all

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.

"""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.

Re:Expect conservative meltdown.

[Pete (big-pete)]

black men have longer ... you know, than white men

Prison sentences?

-- Pete.

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.