Trump’s Victory: Google, Facebook To Restrict Ads On Fake News Sites
Google and Facebook moved Tuesday to cut off advertising revenue to bogus news sites, acting after criticism of the role fake news played in the US presidential election.
“We’ve been working on an update to our publisher policies and will start prohibiting Google ads from being placed on misrepresentative content, just as we disallow misrepresentation in our ads policies,” a Google statement to AFP said.
“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.”
Also over the past week, Mark Zuckerberg has twice dismissed claims that bogus stories publicised on Facebook swung the election in Donald Trump’s favour.
He said the notion was a “pretty crazy idea” and claimed that only 1 per cent of content shared on Facebook is inauthentic.
And that its own advertising policy bans deceptive and misleading content, including fake news sites.
However, that stat has been called into question by some critics, who say that it refers to all content posted to the site, not just news stories.
“In accordance with the Audience Network Policy, we do not integrate or display ads in apps or sites containing content that is illegal, misleading or deceptive, which includes fake news,” a Facebook statement said.
“While implied, we have updated the policy to explicitly clarify that this applies to fake news. Our team will continue to closely vet all prospective publishers and monitor existing ones to ensure compliance.”
The electoral victory of Donald Trump has sparked heightened scrutiny of online and social media, especially the role of bogus news that appeared to help rally Trump supporters.
Some news stories which went viral included headlines such as “Hillary Clinton Calling for Civil War If Trump Is Elected” and “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President.”
Curled from Huffingtonpost.co.uk, and phys.org
