A man walks past a building on the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif.
Google announced Friday that it’s adding a special feature to its news service — Fact Check. Searchers will now know who checked the validity of a news story and the conclusion they arrived at.
The Fact Check tag “identifies articles that include information fact checked by news publishers and fact-checking organizations.” Each Fact Check snippet “will display information on the claim, who made the claim, and the fact check on that particular claim.”
The rating system will rank stories from “true” to “false” but will also denote stories it finds “partly true” and “partly false.” Searches will also have the option, via hyperlink in the snippet, to review the fact-checkers’ content on the same subject.
This, of course, begs the question: Who are the fact-checkers?
Anyone can volunteer to be one, says Google, cautioning that “Only publishers that are algorithmically determined to be an authoritative source of information will qualify for inclusion.”
Currently, the growing list of 115 organizations includes the likes of CNN, The Washington Post, NBC, CBS, and The New York Times, to name a few.
So now, not only will the corporate media be able to deem which content is acceptable and which isn’t, it’ll also be able — again, the link will be right there in the snippet — to guide readers toward their own view on the matter.
Fact Check: A rating system for the corporate media and by the media corporations.
Incidentally, there’s already a mechanism in place for calling out bullshit. It’s called the independent media.
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