Google Ends Fact Check Project, Crediting TheDCNF Investigation With Decision
Google Ends Fact Check Project, Crediting TheDCNF Investigation With Decision
ByERIC LIEBERMAN 1:16 PM 01/19/2018
Google says it is discontinuing its fact-check
feature because it proved to be too faulty for public use, directly attributing
the decision to an investigation by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The
company has no date set for when it will return, if ever.
“We launched the reviewed claims
feature at the end of last year as an experiment with the aim of helping people
quickly learn more about news publications,” a spokeswoman for Google told
TheDCNF, while also adding that TheDCNF was the catalyst for the recent move.
“We said previously that we encountered challenges in our systems that maps
fact checks to publishers, and on further examination it’s clear that we are
unable to deliver the quality we’d like for users.”
There were two main problems with the fact-check widget,
which appeared on the sidebar of Google’s search results for very few sites and
publications.
First, the legitimate outlets
chosen were virtually all ones with conservatives audiences. The Daily Caller,
for example, was given such treatment, while sites like Vox, Slate, The
Huffington Post, Mother Jones and several others clearly on the left side of
the political spectrum were not.
Second, and perhaps most
importantly, many of the fact-checks were wrong. One of the purported reviewed
claims was for an article that straightforwardly reported
that yet another member of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team
was a donor for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President
Barack Obama.
Google attributed the fact-check
to The Washington Post, something it’s vice president of communications took
issue with.
“We went back and double-checked the story and the information
submitted to Google, and The Daily Caller was not mentioned at all, even in
links,” Kristine Coratti, of WaPo, told TheDCNF. “We clearly labeled the
source, so I cannot speak to how The Daily Caller ended up being erroneously
listed as the source of the fact-checked quote in this case.”
After days of back-and-forth with
representatives at Google, TheDCNF was told it was probably due to the
algorithms, something the company doesn’t talk about as a matter of internal
policy.
Google removed that single
purported fact-check at the time of TheDCNF’s initial inquiries, but there were
several others that were also false, if not all of them.
For instance, 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…”
A quick read of the news piece shows that there was no
mention of a bill or any form of legislation. The story was merely a straightforward
reporting of a disturbing incident originally reported on by a local news outlet.
The whole program has been
suspended for the foreseeable future as of Friday. Google engineers are
reportedly heading back to the drawing boards to see how they can vastly
improve a fact-check system, while 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,” the
Google spokeswoman continued, “we are putting the experiment on hold.”
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