Alphabet Inc.’s Google will soon stop serving adverts on fake news websites. A statement from the giant company said plans are underway to introduce a policy change to prevent websites that misrepresent content from using its AdSense advertising network, a move aimed at halting the spread of “fake news” and other types of misinformation on the internet
“Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose of the web property,” Google said in a statement.
The news comes days after Facebook, Twitter and Google were blamed for influencing US president elect Donald Trump’s victory. In a recent backlash, several Clinton supporters took Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to task for allowing fake stories to circulate within its platform. But the Tech Company CEO refuted the claims, saying:
“Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99 percent of what people see is authentic,” he wrote in a blog post on Saturday. “Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes.”
AdSense, which allows advertisers to place text ads on the millions of websites that are part of Google’s network, is a major source of money for many publishers.
A report in BuzzFeed News last month showed how several publishers in Macedonia were creating websites with fake news – much of it denigrating Clinton – which were widely shared on Facebook.
That sharing in turn led people to click on links which brought them to the Macedonian websites, which could then make money on the traffic via AdSense.
Google and Facebook are currently working on an algorithm to detect fake news, which will see them banned from placing adverts, thus denying them revenue.
From now henceforth, factual news is what Google encourages.