Google announced it will no longer use its “fact-checking” feature due to its clear bias against alternative media sources. The feature was designed to provide users with more information about news publications, but proved to be unreliable in practice. Google stated that the main issues with the fact-check widget were:
The Legitimacy of Outlets The legitimate outlets selected were mostly those with conservative audiences, while liberal outlets were excluded. For example, The Daily Caller was given the treatment while sources like Vox, Slate, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones, and others were not.
Wrong Fact-Checks Many of the fact-checks were incorrect, such as the fact-check of an article that reported that a member of Robert Mueller’s investigative team was a donor for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Google attributed the fact-check to The Washington Post, which was incorrect.
Google removed the incorrect fact-check after inquiries from The Daily Caller News Foundation, but there were several others that were also false. For example, a “claim” attributed to The Daily Caller by Google’s feature and its third-party fact-checking partner, Snopes, was “a transgender woman raped a young girl in a women’s bathroom because bills were passed…” However, the article made no mention of any legislation.
The “fact-checking” program has been suspended for the time being, and Google engineers are working to improve the system. It remains to be seen if the company will abandon the project altogether.
“As we continue to work on addressing this problem and assess how best to serve our users,” said a Google spokeswoman, “we are putting the experiment on hold.”