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While the world is scrambling to address fake news, with entire nations actually considering legal options in dealing with it, Google was recently caught committing exactly the kind of thing it pledged to stamp out. Over the weekend, the tech company accidentally allowed crazy conspiracy theories and downright lies to spread through a service called “Featured Snippets.”
As the BBC notes, there were some troubling developments with the feature when snippets of articles started circulating which were written by sources that have provided no factual evidence or sources and have been branded as disreputable on many occasions by legitimate news organizations.
There’s one piece with the title that read “Is Obama planning a coup?” that is accusing the former US president of colluding with China to overthrow the government by the end of his term. There were other articles that contained fraudulent information as well, including one that involved “Proposition 63.” The snippet actually called it "a deceptive ballot initiative that will criminalize millions of law abiding Californians".
To Google’s credit, there was also a link directly under the snippet about Obama’s supposed coup, which debunked the article. Even so, the fact that the snippets actually featured fake news if only for a short period of time is still a sign of how difficult the trend is to stop.
By Monday, Google announced that the fake news incident did indeed happen, CNET reports. The company also acknowledged that despite their best efforts, there will always be fraudulent content that will slip through the cracks.
"Unfortunately, there are instances when we feature a site with inappropriate or misleading content," a spokesperson from Google said.
According to Google, the error was made by the algorithm employed for “Featured Snippets,” which apparently didn’t discriminate between trustworthy sources and ones that were not. By the time the search engine site noticed what had happened, too much time had passed before the problem could be rectified.
