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Google And Facebook Point At Taking Down Fake-News Sites

By Sarah | Update Date: Nov 16, 2016 07:50 AM EST

When the US presidential elections came out it was indeed a moment of shock for the entire world. Looks like Google and Facebook waited for the Donald Trump "surprisingly elected" day to realize that people across the globe actually think that 9 out of 10 stories which are out on the internet to be genuine.

Election Results and Criticisms

With just a week past the unexpected victory of US President elect- Donald J Trump, the world top internet behemoths have been facing  heaping amounts criticism on how fake news on their websites have been highly influential on the outcome of the US Presidential Elections.

Following the continuous criticisms, the two internet giants on Monday, made it clear that they will not tolerate any sort of misinformation targeting to put down the fake news sites.  Debates on the Presidential election results accused that voters were in favor of Donald Trump based on the misleading and fake stories posted in the social networking sites.

Fakes stories seeding around the web

One of such outright wrong stories was said to have reported that Pope Francis had endorsed Mr. Trump.On Sunday, the website called 70News had wrongly stated that Mr. Trump, who won the Electoral College, was ahead of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, even in the popular vote count.

Google takes steps to curb Fake News Sites

By Monday afternoon, the world largest search engine, Google started its work against news sites. The company said that websites that spread fake news using its online advertising shall be banned. After a few hours Facebook, the largest social network, updated its Facebook Audience Network policy, that it will not display ads in sites that have misleading or illegal content, including fake news sites.

Facebook's updated Ad Policy

According to the statement issued by Facebook spokesperson, "We have updated the policy to explicitly clarify that this applies to fake news and our team will continue to closely vet all prospective publishers and monitor existing ones to ensure compliance."

Further steps to keep fake news at bay

Google also reported that the software algorithms uses hundreds of factors to determine the ranking of news stories with the goal "to provide the most relevant and useful results for the users"- Andrea Faville, a Google spokeswoman

She also added that "In this case, we clearly didn't get it right, but we are continually working to improve our algorithms."

In a post on his Facebook page, Mark Zuckerberg CEO of Facebook said that the over the weekend, 99 percent the content on the site is authentic, and only a tiny amount is fake news and hoaxes.

Facebook reaches 1.8 billion people around the globe and researches suggest that nearly half of American adults rely on Facebook as a news source. The ad policy update will not curtail the flow of fake news stories into Facebook spreading through news feeds seen by users on the social network.

"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," said Google's spokesperson Ms. Faville

Google's policy will strategize a mix of automated and manual reviews to determine what is fake. Looks like the satirical news written on the web for humorous effect, will face the collateral damage!

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