Google To Invest $300 Million In Fighting Fake News

Alphabet Inc. GOOGL is working hard to combat the proliferation of fake news. With the company's latest efforts to crack down on fake news and support quality journalism, Google, a unit of Alphabet recently announced new measures termed as Google News Initiative.

The company plans to spend $300 million over three years on different projects to support its new initiatives. Its GNI is focused toward strengthening reliable and quality journalism, supporting new organizations, and empowering credible news through technological innovation.

Mr. Philipp Schindler, Google's chief business officer and senior vice-president, said "The GNI is aimed at curbing online misinformation and disinformation, detecting "synthetic media" – like digitally altered photographs - and supporting information literacy programmes to "build a stronger future for journalism."

Google's Steps to Curb Spreading of Fake News

The company has added many new features on Google platforms to combat fake news. In addition, Google has tweaked its algorithms to highlight relevant content from trustworthy sources during elections and support credible publishers of news.

Earning money at the same time is also equally important. To increase its top-line numbers, Google has launched a feature called Subscribe with Google. This will allow users to easily subscribe to various news outlets, helping publishers to engage readers across Google.

Google has also kept in mind the needs of the students. It has teamed up with the Poynter Institute, Stanford University and Local Media Association to launch MediaWise, a U.S. project. This project is designed to improve digital information literacy among young consumers.

For the news organizations, Google unveiled an open-source tool called Outline that will allow them to set up their own virtual private network (VPN) on a private server. This would protect their systems from DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks and provide their journalists more secure access to the Internet.

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