Google News to include “Fact Check” label to stop wrong news stories

Google News will include a "Fact Check" label in a bid to crack down on public comments, which may take liberties with facts.

Reliable facts have become extremely rare in an era of adversarial politics and media bias. Google News already used "Most referenced", "In-Depth" and "Highly Cited" to help readers find reliable news sources, and with "Fact Check" it was inititing an effort to highlight articles which tried to avoid blindly repeating the lies by public figures.

Google News will not manually fact-check articles, instead it will give news sites the option to include ClaimReview tags in their articles to indicate that facts had been checked.

Though it was not abuse proof, Google said if a site used the ClaimReview tags but failed to follow the criteria the search giant might ignore the tags or even exclude the site from Google News.

The fact-checking criteria included discrete claims and checks would need to be easily identifiable in the body of fact-check articles. Readers needed to be able to understand what was checked, and the conclusions that were drawn.

Analysis would need to be transparent as regards sources and methods, with citations and references to primary sources.

Meanwhile, Google said in a blog post, ''Over the last several years, fact checking has come into its own. Led by organizations like the International Fact-Checking Network, rigorous fact checks are now conducted by more than 100 active sites, according to the Duke University Reporter's Lab.

They collectively produce many thousands of fact-checks a year, examining claims around urban legends, politics, health, and the media itself.

In the seven years since we started labelling types of articles in Google News (e.g., In-Depth, Opinion, Wikipedia), we've heard that many readers enjoy having easy access to a diverse range of content types.

Earlier this year, we added a ''Local Source'' Tag to highlight local coverage of major stories. Today, we're adding another new tag, ''Fact check,'' to help readers find fact checking in large news stories. You'll see the tagged articles in the expanded story box on news.google.com and in the Google News & Weather iOS and Android apps, starting with the US and the UK.''