Google News Will Purge Sites Masking Their Country of Origin (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg: Google moved to strip from its news search results publications that mask their country of origin or intentionally mislead readers, a further step to curb the spread of fake news that has plagued internet companies this year. To appear in Google News results, websites must meet broad criteria set out by the company, including accurately representing their owners or primary purposes. In an update to its guidelines released Friday, the search giant added language stipulating that publications not "engage in coordinated activity to mislead users."

Additionally the new rules read: "This includes, but isn't limited to, sites that misrepresent or conceal their country of origin or are directed at users in another country under false premises." A popular tactic for misinformation campaigns is to pose as a credible U.S. news outlet. Russian Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-backed organization, used that technique to reach an audience of nearly 500,000 people, spread primarily through Twitter accounts, Bloomberg reported earlier.

Comments

Google translate

[Okian Warrior]

I entered the OP text into "Google Translate", here's what I got:

We're making a bunch of private rules which are ill-defined, fuzzy, and overly broad. We're going to couple these with selective enforcement backed by AI algorithms using a high false-positive rate, and use it to remove sites without warning or identifying what specific sections are in violation or what rules are violated.

In that way, Google will strip out all fake news, ensuring that only true and correct news remains.

Re:Google translate

[king neckbeard]

Why not? Doing nothing is often the best solution, particularly if every proposed solution is a net negative.

Re:Google translate

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with the hate for this measure?

Where I come from, virtually every product you can buy is required, by law, to be labelled with its country of origin. If you buy French cheese or German beer or Spanish olives, you can be confident that they really were produced in those countries.

There's no restriction to freedom of speech involved here. If you want to produce a news page about events in, say, Egypt from the USA, you can do that. Or if you want to comment on US news from Moldavia, there's nothing to stop you. You just have to be up-front about where you're doing it from.

What is wrong with requiring that pages not be actively mislabelled?

Re:Google translate

[king neckbeard]

The far right is a disease. Diseases infect opportunistically. In a healthy democracy, the press is the immune system to such a disease. The flaws in our heavily consolidated media, with very strong pro-corporate values, have failed to function because they've prioritized access to politicians over their duty to hold politicians responsible. Congress has unbelievably low approval ratings, because they are accurately perceived as bought-off scumbags. And the media rarely bothers to press politicians to any real extent, even with some of the most egregious of cases.

The reason that we are susceptible to fake news is because the mass of the fourth estate is having pleasant conversations with criminals, instead of doing their job and holding those criminals accountable. The solution isn't censorship, it's giving people a reason to have some faith in the 'legitimate' media. And no, it's not going to be fixed overnight, not with all the damage we've done.

More of the same

[Templer421]

They already exclude anything to the right of Trotsky.

A new age of internet

[Okian Warrior]

It's even worse than that.

There are actual published papers, such as this one, that can't tell the difference between fake and real.

The cited paper specifically calls out the infamous spirit cooking article from InfoWars.

The problem is, although that article sparked a torrent of fake claims, everything actually presented in that article was verified. None of the "fakeness" came from the article, only by people repeating the information and adding hyperbole. John Podesta did get an invite, it was a spirit cooking invite, and Abramovic did in fact pose with a bloody goat's head. Nothing to do with Clinton, and Podesta declined the invite.

That article was roundly derided on the internet because it went against the narrative. It's now enshrined as a classic piece of fake news simply because the informations presented were politically motivated and "inconvenient".

It almost seems like we're entering a new age of internet news, where what is considered "fake" is judged by the consensus of likes and dislikes.

Re: not engage in coordinated activity to mislead.

[lucm]

so they're gonna block foxnews, infowars and breitbart? sweet. so i can use google news again. that's great!

Google. Helping you build your liberal echo chamber since 1998, one biased filter at a time.

Re:I hope they coordinate with other sites.

[lucm]

This is a very reasonable form of defense

Defense against what? Hackers that leak emails proving that the mainstream media is in bed with the DNC? Controversial trolls that force people to question the political dogmas? I think we need more of those, not less.

In any event, Google can apply their biased filters as much as they want to promote their social agenda, all it will achieve is that people will realize that they are as dishonest and misleading as CNN. They're driving themselves into irrelevance.

Re: not engage in coordinated activity to mislead.

[lucm]

You guys bitch when Google doesn't do anything about the fake news and political hacking

This has never happened. You're the one posting fake news.

Re:I hope they coordinate with other sites.

[lucasnate1]

I never heard anyone telling people to question dogma, only to switch from one dogma to the other.

Re: I hope they coordinate with other sites.

[c6gunner]

Defense against what?

Liars and frauds. If you're pretending to be a large American company when you're a single guy in a basement in Minsk, we've already established that you're a liar. No need to give you any free publicity.

Re:I hope they coordinate with other sites.

[Gravis Zero]

This is a very reasonable form of defense

Defense against what? Hackers that leak emails proving that the mainstream media is in bed with the DNC? Controversial trolls that force people to question the political dogmas?

No, defense against propaganda that is intended to intensify the divisions within out nation. What they do does not make people question their politics but rather harden people in their viewpoints. I'm all for exposing corruption but their goal is simply to cause civil unrest and promote political extremism to fuel that agenda.

I very much want to what you are claiming they do but the fact is that they are making people more extreme in their viewpoints and normalizing that extremism.

Re:ask me if I care about Google News .

[Tough Love]

I had finally enough of google news and went to Bing news. Even though I hate Microsoft... this Google arrogance is really getting to me. Bing news format is a lot better, it presents a lot more articles, and it has a politics section, which is about the only thing I read these days.

i don't care about clinton

[aepervius]

What I do care on the other hand is that fox news is spreading blatant lies. People keep complaining about "fake news" but the reality is one of the biggest purveyor was not the russian (which *maybe* did it for the election) but fox news which does it 365 days/year. They distort most of the time and outright lies sometimes. That may be my scientific training, I can't stand such bullshitter attitude.