Google Adds a Fact Check Label

When you look at Google News, you might see articles that are tagged with terms like “Highly cited” or “Trending”, or “Opinion”. Google has now added “Fact check” to that list of tags. Google is doing this “to shine a light on its efforts to divine fact from fiction, wisdom from spin.”

Google points out that “fact checking has come into its own”. It explains a little bit about this new tag.

Today, we’re adding another new tag, “Fact check”, to help readers find fact checking in large news stories. You’ll see the tagged articles in the expanded story box on news.google.com, and in the Google News & Weather iOS and Android apps, starting with the U.S. and the U.K.

Google News has criteria in place that they will use to determine whether an article might contain fact checks. They are using the schema.org ClaimReview markup. Google News will also “look for sites that follow the commonly accepted criteria for fact checks”.

Google Support has more information about what determines whether or not the “Fact check” label will be applied to an article. There are criteria that Google considers to be characteristics of fact-checking sites:

• Discrete claims and checks must be easily identified in the body of fact-check articles. Readers should be able to understand what was checked, and what conclusions were reached.
• Analysis must be transparent about sources and methods, with citations and references to primary sources.
• The organization must be nonpartisan, with transparent funding and affiliations. It should examine a range of claims in its topic area, instead of targeting a single person or entity.
• Article titles must indicate that a claim is being reviewed, state the conclusions reached, or simply frame that the article’s contents consist of fact-checking.