Google and Facebook take aim at fake news sites

Facebook has been at the epicentre of the debate, accused by some commentators of swinging voters in favour of Donald Trump

Over the last week, two of the world’s biggest internet companies have faced mounting criticism over how fake news on their sites may have influenced the presidential election’s outcome.

On Monday, those companies responded by making it clear that they would not tolerate such misinformation by taking pointed aim at fake news sites’ revenue sources.

Google kicked off the action on Monday afternoon when the Silicon Valley search giant said it would ban websites that peddle fake news from using its online advertising service. Hours later, Facebook, the social network, updated the language in its Facebook Audience Network policy, which already says it will not display ads in sites that show misleading or illegal content, to include fake news sites.

“We have updated the policy to explicitly clarify that this applies to fake news,” a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. “Our team will continue to closely vet all prospective publishers and monitor existing ones to ensure compliance.”

Taken together, the decisions were a clear signal that the tech behemoths could no longer ignore the growing outcry over their power in distributing information to the American electorate.

Facebook has been at the epicentre of that debate, accused by some commentators of swinging some voters in favour of President-elect Donald J Trump through misleading and outright wrong stories that spread quickly via the social network. One such false story claimed that Pope Francis had endorsed Trump.

Google did not escape the glare, with critics saying the company gave too much prominence to false news stories. On Sunday, the site Mediaite reported that the top result on a Google search for “final election vote count 2016” was a link to a story on a website called 70News that wrongly stated that Trump, who won the Electoral College, was ahead of his Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton, in the popular vote.

By Monday evening, the fake story had fallen to number 2 in a search for those terms. Google says software algorithms that use hundreds of factors determine the ranking of news stories.