Google rewards news sites which stick to the facts in the post-truth era

A "Fact Check" label is coming to Google News as the search giant attempts to crack down on public comments which play fast and loose with the truth.

Reliable facts have become an endangered species in an era of adversarial politics and media bias. Google News already uses labels like "Most referenced", "In-Depth" and "Highly Cited" to help readers find reliable news sources, but now it's adding "Fact Check" to the mix in an effort to highlight articles which try to avoid blindly regurgitating the lies of public figures.

Google News isn't manually fact-checking articles, instead it's giving news sites the option to include ClaimReview tags in their articles to indicate that facts have been checked. This is obviously open to abuse, although Google says if a site uses the ClaimReview tags but does not follow the criteria the search giant may ignore the tags or even banish the site from Google News.

The fact-checking criteria includes;

• Discrete claims and checks must be easily identified in the body of fact-check articles. Readers should be able to understand what was checked, and what conclusions were reached.
• Analysis must be transparent about sources and methods, with citations and references to primary sources.
• The organisation must be non-partisan, with transparent funding and affiliations. It should examine a range of claims in its topic area, instead of targeting a single person or entity.
• Article titles must indicate that a claim is being reviewed, state the conclusions reached, or simply frame that the article's contents consist of fact checking.

Google News' Fact Check label is coming to the United States and United Kingdom first, in time for the US presidential election battle between Trump and Clinton, and it's likely to expand to Australia where politicians also struggle to differentiate fact from fiction. You'd think efforts to strive for accuracy would have bipartisan support, but in some circles any kind of fact-checking is considered a form of political attack – strangely enough people who twist the facts don't like being called out on it.

While fact checking is designed to weed out deliberate untruths, both by public figures and the reporters who write about them, it's obviously harder to crack down on bias where the truth is used selectively or one point of view is suppressed. Bias is also in the eye of the beholder – these days the definition of bias tends to be anyone who doesn't agree with you or has the audacity to point out an inconvenient fact.

There's also the challenge that a growing number of news items are actually comment/opinion pieces, which by their very nature contain a certain level of bias, but it's still possible to check the facts on which those opinions are supposedly based.

Practically every media outlet is considered biased by some part of the political spectrum, so it will be interesting to see whether Google's Fact Check helps to curb bias or whether it's simply labelled another form of bias.

How do you assess the trustworthiness of a news article? Would you put your faith in Google's Fact Check label?