Distinguishing between fake news and truthful news is not always easy, especially on social media. To help us distinguish the true from the false, we need a little common sense and the desire to always check the veracity of the sources. But the new tool called can also give us a hand Fact Check Explorerhandled by Google: a real search engine for fact checking.
Fact Check Explorer, Google helps us unmask fake news
Google had already announced a series of tools for verifying information online late last year. Something we have felt we needed for a long time, but which becomes even more urgent in the era of generative artificial intelligence. Having tools that know how to label fake news and deep fake images created by AI becomes more important every day.
Fact Check Explorer tries to stem hoaxes by aggregating information from reliable sources. Google explains that the tool was created for offer to journalists and fact checkers “a more in-depth way to learn about an image or topic.”
Come funziona Fact Check Explorer?
Google does not carry out or verify fact checks directly. Instead, it leverages Google indexing to make fact checks from trusted sites easily accessible. Using the fact check markup functionality, the tool makes fact checks performed by trusted websites more visible. And it allows you to easily find denials from reliable newspapers and publications.
By opening Fact Check Explorer, you will find a Google style search box: something we are more than accustomed to using. Just choose a topic or a person to find a series of fact checking published online (you can choose a language other than Italian, for international news). You will find a summary of the news, a judgment (false, true, out of context, etc.) and an explanation of why that judgment was reached. You can also click the blue link to go to the site that made the denial and read in detail.
Below the search box, you can find a link that allows you to explore the latest fact checks. By clicking on “recent fact checks”, you can see the latest checks on the veracity of fact checking agencies and authoritative newspapers.
To explore topics, There are also labels for various topics, such as War or Taxes. By clicking on one of these labels, you can find different updates regarding the same topic. Something very convenient for checking the words of politicians or famous people: with one click you can see how many times they have denied it.
This tool also has its limitations
We think that Google’s Fact Check Explorer is an interesting tool: we have put it in our browser’s favorites to use it during our press reviews. Use only online sources with a good reputation, as explained in the documentation. And although it is advisable to use a bit of common sense even when reading denials, not just news, it seems to us to help unmask fake news.
However, there are several limitations. The most obvious depends on the nature of the tool: Fact Check Explorer depends on fact checks published online. So you don’t have access to denials in paper newspapers or specialized magazines. And it can’t work on everything: if no one has done fact checking on a niche topic, you will have to do it yourself by checking the sources.
Furthermore, publishers must publish fact checks in a certain format so that Google recognizes them and layouts them well. We noticed denials without a false/true judgment, and even fact checking on images without the image showing up on the tool page.
Despite the limitations, it represents a great convenience: if some journalist or fact-checker has checked a news story, you can easily find any denial or confirmation.
New tools coming soon
Google has promised to be working on other features for the fact checking tool. Soon we will be able to carry out image searches to discover their veracity. Not only to avoid passing off AI-generated images as real, but also to contextualize them. During the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza we often saw images of other wars in the past and even films and video games passed off as current.
But the fight against hoaxes is a continuous fight, so much so that Google is allocating funds to support associations that do fact checking as part of this initiative. Perhaps also because, as the leading online search engine and as one of the leading producers of generative AI, feels the responsibility to fight fake news.
We at techgameworld.com also do what we can in our own small way: at this link you will find our weekly column “The hoax of the week”, where we talk about the most sensational fake news of the last seven days. Perhaps, using Google’s Fact Check Explorer, writing it will become a little easier.
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Google Fact Check Explorer