Since the election of Donald Trump, several liberals and journalists have blamed the spread of fake news stories online for the success of the New York businessman. Google is responding to these criticisms and is moving to combat fake news.
“We have updated our publisher policies and now prohibit Google ads from being placed on misrepresentative content, just as we disallow misrepresentation in our ads policies,” a Google spokesperson told The Daily Caller. “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.”
This policy would in effect stop sites like The Denver Guardian, which purported to be Denver’s oldest news source, but posted fake news, from receiving Google Adsense money. Adsense is a significant source of income for many sites.
The Washington Post recently reported that a search for “final election results” came up with a fake news source as the top results.
Google admits fault here. A spokesperson said in a statement, “The goal of Search is to provide the most relevant and useful results for our users. In this case we clearly didn’t get it right, but we are continually working to improve our algorithms.”