NDM Story #18 - Google, Facebook Say They Won't Serve Ads to Fake News Sites

Google, Facebook Say They Won't Serve Ads to Fake News Sites

Summary:

Google and Facebook vow that they will attempt to rid of fake news stories being posted on their site as well as stories where the initial journalist has not been credited for their work. Facebook has made the bold statement that "more than 99% of the things shared on Facebook is authentic". Facebook also reinforced their rules about not promoting advertisement on misleading articles or posts, which clearly haven't 100% been put in place. Google is taking a similar approach to this by blocking pages which have misleading information on it, in order to prevent the backlash that they've been receiving so far for permitting transmission of this information. He also claims that "Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other."

My opinion:

I think that Facebook and Google will never truly care about any of this. I believe that they are lying when they claim to be working on preventing fake news stories because they seem to be extremely profit driven as opposed to customer satisfaction driven. If they weren't being moaned at by actual news institutions, I highly doubt that they would undergo any of these procedures or changes. Google faced similar heat on Monday morning. The top search result for a query around the election result directed users to a Wordpress blog citing unverified information. Google copped to the error. "In this case we clearly didn't get it right, but we are continually working to improve our algorithms," Ms. Faville said. This shows that both sites are clearly susceptible to error and are finding it very difficult to handle the level at which false story sharing is to handle and prevent.