Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Google is demoting misleading and offensive content in its search by updating algorithms and offering users new ways to report bad results.

The change follows increased attention to flaws in top search results, including the promotion of fake news — and deliberately misleading or false information formatted to look like news — during the 2016 presidential election.

Google said it has updated its algorithms to better prioritize “authoritative” content. Content may be deemed authoritative based on signals such as affiliation of a site with a university or verified news source, how often other sites link to the site in question and the quality of the sites that link.

“We’ve adjusted our signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content, so that issues similar to the Holocaust denial results that we saw back in December are less likely to appear,” writes Ben Gomes, Google’s executive in charge of search, in a blog post published today....

Google has agreed to fund a project to develop automated fact checking tools amid anger over the prevalent of fake news websites during the US presidential election.

UK fact checking organisation, FullFact, has announced it has been awarded €50,000  (£43,000) by the tech giant’s Digital News Initiative to build the first  “fully automated end-to-end fact checking system”.

In a statement, FullFact explained that the system will have two main features. 

One will inform readers if something reported as fact has already been proven inaccurate.

The other mode will fact check claims automatically using Natural Language Processing and statistical analysis in real-time – something FullFact said has never been done before – by highlighting the text and having a factbox appear when the user hovers over it....