14 DAY TRIAL // Google is in a bit of a tight spot over its search engine and Google Home device spewing lies picked off from fake news websites.
Despite the company's desire to fight against fake news, it seems to be having quite a bit of trouble picking wrong from right, and this is mostly due to the complete lack of human curation. Of course, with the amounts of information Google processes every day, that seems impossible, so perhaps all that it needs is better algorithms.
Google Home has been known to respond to queries about various topics by picking information from the top stories on those subjects, even if they came from fake news sites. One incident that has made the rounds on the Internet is Google's response after being asked if Barack Obama was planning a coup.
Google Home quickly turned to Featured Snippets and read a paragraph from a questionable source claiming that Obama was actually planning to overthrow the US government at the end of his 2016 presidential term. Of course, that didn't happen.
If you're wondering if Obama is planning a coup, Google's "one true answer" is yes. FFS. pic.twitter.com/pFr7omJttU — Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) March 5, 2017
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Google told Recode that it's true that the Featured Snippets are generated by algorithms, but it has people who investigate any story flagged for having "inappropriate or misleading content." As soon as the aforementioned story was debunked, Google took it down.
“Featured Snippets in Search provide an automatic and algorithmic match to a given search query, and the content comes from third-party sites. Unfortunately, there are instances when we feature a site with inappropriate or misleading content. When we are alerted to a Featured Snippet that violates our policies, we work quickly to remove them, which we have done in this instance. We apologize for any offense this may have caused," Google told Recode.
Other instances showed Google naming several US presidents as having a tie to the KKK, which is once more unverified information.
It's pretty clear that Google will have to put in a lot of work to get rid of this problem, but the thing is, it might very well never truly be able to fix it. As long as people keep reporting fake sources to Google, however, there's hope that it will fix the issues as they appear.