WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 (UPI) — Internet giants Google and Facebook announced they plan to halt the increasing proliferation of fake news by hitting the misleading websites where it hurts — advertising.
The two companies have come under fire, particularly since last week’s presidential election, for widely shared false information about candidates on their sites. Users often are directed to these stories by provocative headlines.
On Monday, Google announced it will ban any sites that “misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information” from participating in its ad service, Google AdSense. These sites generate revenue when ads are seen or clicked on.
The policy change was not in reaction to the election, but had been in the works, a Google spokeswoman said.
“The goal of search is to provide the most relevant and useful results for our users,” Andrea Faville, a Google spokeswoman, said in a statement. “In this case, we clearly didn’t get it right, but we are continually working to improve our algorithms.”
Last week, top search results on Google for “final election numbers” “final election results” and “who won the popular vote” included information form “70news” that falsely said Donald Trump won the popular vote by 700,000 votes. Hillary Clintonnow leads in the popular vote by more than 1 million votes nationwide, though Trump won the Electoral College.
Facebook also announced Monday it updated the language in its Facebook Audience Network policy, including keeping advertising dollars from fake new sites.
“We do not integrate or display ads in apps or sites containing content that is illegal, misleading or deceptive, which includes fake news,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to CBS News. “While implied, we have updated the policy to explicitly clarify that this applies to fake news. Our team will continue to closely vet all prospective publishers and monitor existing ones to ensure compliance.”
Facebook has downplayed its role in shaping opinions.
CEO Mark Zuckerbergworte in a Facebook post Saturday wrote, “We must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”
At a a technology conference near San Francisco on Friday, Zuckerberg said it is “a pretty crazy idea” Facebook influenced the election “in any way.”
“Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99 percent of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes,” he wrote. “The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics.”
But Facebook is working to rectify the problem.
“We don’t want any hoaxes on Facebook,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Our goal is to show people the content they will find most meaningful, and people want accurate news. We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here. We have made progress, and we will continue to work on this to improve further.”
A Pew study this year found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook.
Overall, 62 percent of U.S. adults get news on social media, including 18 percent who do so often.
In August, Facebook apologized after a fake story claiming Fox News had fired anchor Megyn Kelly for being “a closet liberal who actually wants Hillary to win” appeared in its Trending section. It came from the right-wing website End The Fed.
In September, Trending promoted a so-called “9/11 truther” circulating the false claim that bombs and not terrorist-piloted planes brought down the Twin Towers in Manhattan.
Before the election, President Barack Obama weighed in.
“People, if they just repeat attacks enough, and outright lies over and over again, as long as it’s on Facebook and people can see it, as long as it’s on social media, people start believing it,” he said. “And it creates this dust cloud of nonsense.”
