Google News adds new fact-checking tag for publishers

We are told that we are living in a post-truth era, or at least an era defined by post-truth politics.

Trust in the media is also at an all-time low, according to a 2016 Gallup poll in the US.

This is not helped by the fact that Facebook replaced the human editors working on its Trending topics section with an algorithm that soon began trending fake and factually incorrect news stories.

I’m pretty sure a human would have spotted the one from a website that actually had “Fakingnews” in its domain name.

Anyway, lest we distrust all technology, Google News has added a new fact-checking tag for publishers to use.

Google News has already been using tags for the past seven years with labels including local news, in-depth, opinion and Wikipedia.

So far, fewer than 10 websites – including PolitiFact and Full Fact – are on board with the new label but it means that fact-checked news stories will be labelled clearly for readers.

blog.google/topics/journalism-news/labeling-fact-check-articles-google-news/