It’s hoped the feature will do a better news job than Facebook’s Trending Topics.
Given what is happening in the U.S. election campaign, there has never been a more crucial time for fact-checking of news stories, and Facebook seems to be doing a fairly poor job of it. Now Google has waded into the fray with a new fact-checking tag for Google News.
As Google’s head of news, Richard Gingras, explained in a blog post this week, the Internet giant GOOGL 0.06% is going to be highlighting pages in Google News that fit the criteria for fact-checking.
For some time now, Google has had a series of sub-categories that it groups articles into, including “highly cited”—which is the rough equivalent of Facebook’s Trending Topics—meaning it has been linked to a lot by prominent sites, as well as “local source.”
Now there will be a “fact check” tag as well. Sites that want their articles to be eligible just have to add a certain kind of formatting to their pages, as specified by Schema.org, an open community sponsored by Google, Microsoft MSFT 0.88% , and other tech companies.
Bill Adair, the founder of Politifact, one of the earliest fact-checking sites on the web, applauded the effort in a post on Twitter TWTR -4.33% , calling it a “huge step for fact-checking.”
