Google takes on fake news with $300 million News Initiative - Polidicks

Google takes on fake news with $300 million News Initiative The program is designed to improve the quality of journalism and the business models of publishers at a time when most are struggling. The internet search giant on Tuesday unveiled the Google News Initiative, a worldwide effort in which Google will partner with news publications to help highlight the most accurate information possible, especially during breaking-news situations. Google also expressed its commitment to helping publishers generate a sustainable source of revenue. Google is committing $300 million dollars over the next three years to meet its goals, Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler said in a blog post. https://www.cnet.com/news/google-news-initiative-launches-to-boost-better-journalism/

Interesting. Curious to see if they'll actually be to pull it off and make a difference.

Cautiously optimistic. Google is a household name used by every person with access to the Internet, if it can be used to report ACTUAL CORRECT news then that can only be a good thing.

Maybe I just have a poor understanding of the history of media but I think this is pretty unprecedented in a cool way. More and more totally private companies find themselves in positions to manipulate a great deal of social discourse due to their positions of authority. We've seen facebook roll out features to fight against "fake news", and we're currently battling a pretty terrifying battle with YouTube to keep the average content creator, to be dramatic, uncensored. These are massive internet entities and they've been thrust with the responsibility to handle how a great deal of society processes information, perhaps for the indefinite future. While this situation has been mostly pretty terrible for us regular folk and usually results in disaster (the aforementioned facebook efforts are a great example of how information flow is being severely mismanaged by a huge social media network), it's kind of neat to read a headline where a faceless corporate conglomerate is making genuine efforts to fight against the problem of misinformation spreading. Only time will tell how effective it is, and how pure it's intentions, but still. We live in strange times.

[Quote]Google also expressed its commitment to helping publishers generate a sustainable source of revenue. [/quote] Sounds pretty crony and oligarchical

with how well they're able to manage Youtube, I completely doubt their ability to do this properly.

I don't like the idea of any single source being the one source of real, "true," news.

300 million dollars just so Google can create and promote their own brand of fake news

I'd like to know if they actually mean it

While I don't at all think this is gonna be the case in the immediate future, it does set a worrying precedence for the future where the world will begin to rely on Google, the "One True Source of Information". And from that point once everyone is reliant on it, they can THEN begin to shift the media towards whatever direction they like. In the short term, this is great. Long term... worrying. We have to be very careful with so much information going forward in the future.

This is a pretty stark contrast to Facebook shitting the bed

Which is also probably the point. This is just PR at this point, we'll have to see if it makes any difference.

I think the idea is worth considering because serious news outlets would be less enticed to release tabloid-tier garbage if they don't have to worry about the bottom line but y'know, it all rides on Google not becoming evil within the next 50-something years and spinning everything in their favor, which I can definitely see happening.

The revenue thing is mainly about new advertising and analytics tool from Google, as well as this new subscription system which will be rolling out on several major news outlets soon: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/original_images/Miami-Herald-Buy-Flow_2.gif

A nice gesture, and one upon a time I definitely would've trusted Google to be the "good guy" in all of this (and even now I'd like to hope they are), but if YouTube is anything to go by, Google is completely spineless when going up against other major corporations. And in this case, major corporations' interests are a big part of why we are where we are in regards to this whole "fake news" garbage.

I don't know if they could pull something off like this, would this meaning theonion.com would get taken off their search engine I wonder. That would be a damn shame