Last week, TFPP reported that Google’s “Reviewed Claims” feature, a function that ostensibly brought up a selection of fact-checks during searches of political websites to help readers guard against fake news, was actually smearing conservative websites with highly biased and sometimes outright inaccurate results. Now, it turns out that the pushback was enough to get Google to back down … for now.
The Daily Caller reports that the internet giant has admitted that the function is unreliable, and confirmed that it will be indefinitely suspended.
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“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,” the DC quotes an unnamed spokeswoman as explaining. “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.”
“As we continue to work on addressing this problem and assess how best to serve our users, we are putting the experiment on hold,” she went on.
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Several conservative websites blasted the company when the news came to light, but it was the Daily Caller’s reporting that forced Google to back down:
“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.”
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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.
As TFPP explained last week, part of the problem was that Google outsourced its “fact-checking” to Snopes, the Washington Post, and PolitiFact — all of whom TFPP has called out for inaccuracy and dishonesty in the past.
We decided to test this out for ourselves, and found that TFPP doesn’t get one of those fancy “Reviewed Claims” sections, but Google did spit out something even more outrageous: upon punching in the name of our website, the website itself was the fourth result. Before that we got three links’ worth of the “fake news” treatment — one of which is from none other than Media Matters, one of the most dishonest organizations in America, which Google naturally exempted from all of this treatment.
Also among the conservative sites google spread fake news about? The Federalist:
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Or take another purported fact-check regarding climate change, which creates the impression that there’s something inaccurate about a specific arguable claim because the larger notions about the topic happen to be true.
What’s most amusing about this fact-check is that Google sends people who searched for “The Federalist” to an article correcting a claim made by someone on CNN, an outlet that, somehow, even though they apparently feature contributors who make questionable claims about science, is spared from search-engine truth-police grilling.
Moreover, the quote featured in the “reviewed claim” section is not even in The Federalist article.
It’s good news that Google is backing down on this, but they’ve still got a lot more to answer for; frankly, this just scratches the surface.
