Google and Facebook tighten siege of false news
By Technology
The fight against fake news continues: Google and Facebook showed new strategies in the fight against counterfeit goods on the Internet.
Between November and December 2016, Google found 550 sites trying to trick users, particularly when making masquerading as news sites, and showing ads from Google's advertising platform. Of these, 200 were permanently deleted from that platform.
The false news sites have become a hot topic following Donald Trump's election to the US presidency. Some of these sites were politically motivated and intended to support a candidate and denigrating the other. But many of those who were passing by media organs intended only profit by displaying advertisements, was in own pages, using ad platforms such as Google, or their Facebook page. In November an investigation of BuzzFeed, following a work of British The Guardian, showed how to create sites with false news that favored Trump was a good deal, since supporters of the current president were more likely than the Hillary Clinton to spread this kind of content. Many of these sites were made outside the US.
Google also detected another problem: ads masquerading as news. "It is the growth of the masked ad tabloids'" said Scott Spencer, director of product management, said in a statement "These ads take advantage of current topics. - An election, political debates, the most prominent topics, stories about celebrities - and transformam- to look the headlines of a news site. "
Over the past year, the multinational suspended over 1300 accounts in the advertising platform for creating that kind of disguised as news announcements. The problem is that each of these account reaches a very large number of people: in December were only eliminated 22 accounts, but the multinational estimates that these have been responsible for many false ads seen by over 20 million people a week.
Also Facebook is taking steps to mitigate the problem of false news, after being accused of influencing the US presidential campaign.
The latest part of the plan - which already includes collaboration with facts verification teams, and placing notices on dubious veracity articles - involves the remodeling of how the social network manages its most prominent topics (in English, trending topics ). Once, Facebook automatically would select these topics based on very popular individual publications (with many likes, shares and comments). Now, it takes more: only after there are several publications of various groups of people to comment on the same theme is that this happens to be highlighted.
The context also becomes relevant. Each hot topic now includes a link to an article from a news agency checked, or another source of credible information. This link is selected based on the popularity of information agency and the amount of people to link to the article.
"This should allow find topics highlighted faster, be more effective to present a wide range of news and events from around the world, and also ensure that the most popular topics reflect actual events that are being covered by several media organizations, "said Will Cathcart, the deputy director of Facebook products, in a statement on updating the most prominent topics.
According to Facebook , a "real event" is something that recently happened, is happening now or will happen in the future. The changes should allow Facebook users do not ignore important events and topics for these do not appear directly on feed news.
According to Facebook, the choice of the most prominent themes is completely automated and made based on an algorithm, although all selected topics go through a human review process. The aim is not to censor information but to ensure that the chosen topics are not duplicated and representing relevant events. The Facebook team gives the "example of the pizza": if users are talking about pizza, but there is no article news or material event will not be a major theme.
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