FIGHTING FAKE NEWS.

• Author: Grossbart, Sarah
• Position: MEDIA LITERACY

Made-up stories are taking over the internet. Are tech companies doing enough to stop the spread?

The results were disturbing. Late last year, when Google users typed the phrase, "Did the Holocaust happen?" into the search engine, the first hit was a story--posted on a website run by a hate group--falsely stating that the mass murder of millions of Jews in Europe during World War II (1939-45) never occurred.

That lie--and the fact that it was the top result on the world's most popular search engine--highlighted the growing problem of fake news. Misinformation published online often spreads faster than it can be challenged. Bogus stories shared extensively on social media are then ranked high by Google and other search engines, making them easier to find--and increasing people's sense of their credibility.

"Just because something is in the top five of your search results doesn't mean it's reliable," says Jonathan Anzalone of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University in New York.

The information may be made up, but it can have real-world consequences. In December 2016, a man was arrested at a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., after firing a rifle inside the eatery. He claimed he was "self-investigating" a story that the restaurant had connections to a human trafficking ring linked to the Democratic Party. The story was fake.

Since then, tech companies have come under fire for not doing enough to address the phony stories. Now Google and Facebook--among the biggest distributors of fake news--are rolling out strategies to combat it.

Google & Facebook

Google recently announced plans to minimize the reach of fake news in its searches. The tech giant has assigned more than 10,000 employees to electronically flag articles containing misleading information. This ensures they're ranked lower in Google search results and that users can see that they contain highly suspect or false information.

For example, a recent, widely shared story claimed that 300,000 pounds of rat meat were being sold as chicken wings across the U.S. That article is now tagged as false. In addition, a link directs users to a fact-check of the story by the nonpartisan site PolitiFact.com.

Facebook is launching its own fact-check tool, and the site is working to delete phony accounts run by "bots"--or web robots--that automatically "like" and share fake news. Facebook has also experimented with a more old-fashioned approach to stop misinformation: Before recent elections...