Fake News Fools Google, Company Retaliates Against Culprit Sites

This election has made a lot of issues clearer when before they were just bubbling under the surface, with the proliferation of misinformation fake news being one of the biggest. Facebook has been receiving the brunt of the blame from users for allowing a heavy stream of fraudulent news stories to cycle within its environment. Now, it turns out that even Google was unable to stop such articles from getting through, and the company is not happy about it. In retaliation, the search engine giant will ban all websites featuring fake news from earning revenue via AdSense.

AdSense is Google’s ad network where blogs, publications, and YouTube figures could earn money via ads. This is the service that fake news websites will no longer be able to access once the company is through implementing the changes in its system, Reuters reports.

"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," a spokesperson from Google told the publication.

Although the search engine company is making these changes, it is by no means an admission of its role in shifting the results of the recently concluded presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. Google, along with many tech giants and social media companies are currently under fire for their perceived neglect to address the spread of lies and misinformation during the election cycle.

As The Washington Post notes, Google’s decision to ban fake news websites from AdSense is not an indication that the sites themselves will be removed from the search page. In fact, the company rarely ever does this. This means that fake news will still show up prominently on search results.

The recent election serves to highlight the susceptibility of internet users to believe what they read, see, or watch online without verifying the truth of their content. With tech companies unwilling to actually censor such content, it’s quite possible that fake news will also influence the next election cycle.