Google Executives Are Floating a Plan To Fight Fake News on Facebook and Twitter (qz.com)

Fake news, bots, and propaganda were hot topics at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos last month, and Google executives there floated an intriguing idea to some fellow attendees -- what if the company could tell users whether information is trustworthy before they shared it on social networks like Facebook and Twitter? From a report: Representatives from Google and its parent company Alphabet eagerly discussed how the company can play a greater role in reducing misleading information online, several Davos attendees involved in and briefed on these conversations told Quartz. A notification system, perhaps via an optional extension for Google's Chrome browser, was an idea that these people said was broached more than once. Such a browser-based system controlled by Google could alert users on Facebook's or Twitter's websites when they're seeing or sharing a link deemed to be false or untrustworthy. Right now, this appears to be merely an idea company executives are discussing, not a product in development.

Comments

Re: wow

[ranton]

All of your "fact checkers" said that the Democrats didn't pay for the Steele Dossier... They screamed for months that it was a five-alarm pants-on-fire lie.

They had said there was no public evidence supporting this claim, and until October of 2017 that was a true statement. In October a Washington post article showed that while it was originally funded in 2015 by Republican donors, the Clinton campaign began funding the research in 2016 as opposition research.

Within 24 hours of the Washington post article, and other corroborating research from CNN and Fox News, Snopes updated their information on the topic. This is what good fact checking looks like.