Google is also going to launch its political ad transparency report before Indian elections, scheduled to begin on April 11.
Not
just Facebook and Twitter, Google is also making an effort to ensure
the authenticity of information on its advertisements and video
platform as India heads towards General
Elections in less than a month.
On
Thursday, the company said it is ensuring authoritative news content
gets better play on YouTube, where videos have seen growth in watch
time triple for content from authoritative sources in the last two
years, said Tim Katz, the video platform’s director of news
partnerships.
YouTube,
which is owned by Google,
is ensuring there is news from credible sources that is put on the
platform, with enough context.
With
elections less than a month away, the Indian government has been
trying to address the issue of misinformation and fake news spreading
through social media and messaging platforms such as WhatsApp.
Recently, the Parliamentary Committee on information technology met
with senior executives of Facebook and Twitter and the Election
Commission has also said social media platforms have committed to
help check the spread of fake news in the run up to elections.
The
video platform has introduced fact checks to its panels in India,
just below the search results, which relies on and "open
ecosystem of publishers and fact checking experts".It is
currently available in Engligh and will shortly be available in
Hindi.
The
"Top News" and "Breaking News" sections on
YouTube highlight videos from credible news sources in search results
and during major news events globally.
Google
has partnered with an open source community schema.org, which
provides news organisations with a tool called ClaimReview markup
that helps put "markers" on fact-checked news reports.
Google's systems then decide whether the content would be useful to
users and should show in search results, based on relevancy and
several other factors.
"A
publisher writes a fact-checking story on their own website, then
they take this tool... (which is) like a developer tool, and can put
annotations on to their article. Its like metadata for their
articles. And this allows third parties like Google to scan that
metadata and understand when was this written, what was the topic,
how did they research it, how were they able to verify the veracity
of their claim," said Katz.
He
added that YouTube was working towards the future of online video by
working with news organisations and developing product features for
news on its platform.
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