TL;DR: As one of the largest platforms on the internet, Google strives to maintain its credibility while threatened by the incursion of fake news.

During the 2016 presidential race, virtually every online news source was under attack of fake news. Credible news sources including The Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Gannett publications have come under fire for publishing false information. Falling under the same heat is the very company that allows billions to trust in its omnipotent platforms. Although not the first company to come to mind when discussing news, Google is not floating above the flood of fake news. After the national vote in November, the top result when searching “final election numbers” was a fraudulent, elementary blog reporting what the author noted as “news”: “Final election 2016 Numbers: Trump won both Popular(62.9 M-62.2 M) and Electoral College votes(306-232).” Not only was the headline both misleading and starkly false, the author defended his inaccurate numbers by stating he obtained his information from someone named “Michael” from Twitter; to the rest of the world interested in who won the presidential election, it would have been “Michael” from Twitter reporting such erroneous data. While the recent election fostered thousands of fake news articles striving after attention and controversy, Google has a long history with false news breaking through their algorithm.

In the past few years, Google has seen advancements in policy, implementation of software, and the creation of new features to combat fake news. In most recent development, Google deleted the “In The News” feature that would appear at the top of desktop and mobile devices promoting current articles concerning the searched topic. While this feature often highlighted pressing and controversial news, “In The News” would also promote personal blogs, Reddit threads, and the election results that “Michael” from Twitter reported. The error was found in its allowance for any site to be featured as bona fide content; the feature existed as a “fake news loophole.” For example, even with safeSearch on, googling “TSA” brought up the Reddit thread “F$ck You, TSA,” a thread simply bashing the TSA, as information that was “in the news.” Although Reddit can discuss newsworthy issues, the site cannot be verified as a news source to the slightest degree. While the actual Google News platform efficiently uses credible news sources and denies Reddit, “In the News” posed a great threat to misinforming the population for it was the first content users would see when conducting a Google search; contrastingly, Google News requires users to click on its header after the initial search results pop up. Thus, Google logically removed the faulty feature and put more effort into improving Google News. In 2016, the company advanced its “Fact check” that would only allow headlines verified by one of the hundred sources for fact-checks and containing the schema.org ClaimReview markup.

Google’s chief business officer, Philipp Schindler, recently responded to the influx of fabricated articles at the Code Media conference in 2016: “We have to take the fake news problem very, very seriously and think about what we can do there.” Schindler contributes such increase of fake news to the abuse of Google’s AdSense platform where there is much opportunity to make money. In addition to adjusting policies to combat false information from taking spotlight, Google drastically increased its rate of removing sites in violation of its advertising policy. The number from 2015 to 2016 jumped from 780 million to 1.7 billion in correlation with its improved technology to detect deviant behavior. Under its current ad policy, Google directly prohibits false reporting: listed on its Prohibited Content policy is “Content that enables dishonest behavior,” such as false identities and documents, and “Misrepresentative content,” such as promoting deceptive products or services.

So, with all of the precautionary measures implemented into its complex algorithm, how do fake articles keep slipping through?

Google’s efficacy throughout the years is unanimously significant, but a change in policy and increase in fact-checking is not nearly enough. Recently, the search engine boosted a Metro UK article reporting video footage of a UFO sucking energy from the sun. A post that believes a “spherical alien craft seems to be hoovering up energy  – possibly before turning its beams on Earth,” was the top result for a general search of “aliens” prompted by Google’s new implementation of AMP (accelerated mobile pages) sites. Ridding of the “In The News” feature, Google’s mobile application lists AMP articles at the top of the search page in effort to clean up the results and promote urging news relating to the search. Thus, when energy-sucking aliens appear as an AMP article, there is blatant evidence that Google is still struggling to keep non-credible sources from top results even after retracting “in the news” and redesigning its feature. Schindler attributes such issue to the complexity of labeling a headline “fake”: “Fake news means a lot of different things to different people, and it’s often very hard to draw the line, obviously, between fake news and bad journalism.” However, while there is a blurred line between poor journalism and the intentional publication of misinformation, the delineation between unintelligent journalism and absolute absurdity is crystal clear.

As Google’s software continuously advances and expands, false news will concurrently improve its methodology of publication and continue to catch public attention. Understandably, Facebook is facing this dilemma at a higher extreme, but it must not be forgotten how much greater Google’s platform is. The battle against fabricated news appears as an endless cycle — one platform feeding another — that Google could potentially fight to get out of indefinitely. Although Google CEO Sundar Pichai affirms that “there should just be no situation where fake news gets distributed,” eradicating all falsified reporting from its site is nowhere near the realm of reality. The multi-functional platform allows for virtually any website to appear as a search result, and, unless the company crosses the line of autocracy, it is impossible for Google to deny all deceptive articles from becoming a “Top Story.”

So, if Google cannot stop the fake-news epidemic from spreading, who can?

The answer is simple: its customers. If users would take simply ten seconds to consider the article’s sources and judge the credibility of the publisher, fake news could exist only as a pest easily spotted and swatted away. Also, in just two seconds, users could conveniently click the “News” tab to ensure what they are reading is fact-checked and editorially verified. The spread of false information on the internet could be solved in a matter of seconds, but, because the effort must come from the user rather than the software, the plague will continue to spread. While many will find it difficult to believe, not everything on the internet is true, even if “Michael” from Twitter tweets differently.

Newspapers B&W (5) flickr photo by NS Newsflash shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license