A total of 340 fake news site has been taken out by Google in November and December while close to 200 of those sites were permanently banned from using Google ads, said the company as part of a report on fraudulent advertising Wednesday.
Much like Facebook, Google has been under increased scrutiny for its role in spreading of misleading and fake news ever since the presidential election last November. With changes to its Adsense policy, Google responded to this at the same month prohibiting sites that "misrepresent, misstate or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher's content or the primary purpose" to the sites utilizing Google ads for monetization, reported Variety.
550 sites had been reviewed since those policy changes, said Google on Wednesday - resulting nearly 200 of permanent bans and temporarily cutting off another 140 sites from the company's ad dollar spigot. About 1.7 billion ads for various policy violations in 2016 also were taken down, including 17 million ads for illegal gambling, 80 million misleading or shocking ads and 5 million payday load ads, revealed the company.
However, critics are likely not going to be content with this step alone as much as cutting off ad revenue may hurt so-called fake news sites. Google has increasingly been criticized for the way its algorithms highlight certain news sources as well.
In December, for example, the search engine highlighted a made-up story about President Obama supposedly looking to a third term, and in November, the first Google result for "who won the popular vote" was a conspiracy blog misrepresenting the outcome of the election.
Meanwhile, senior analyst at Forrester Research Susan Bidel who recently co-wrote a report on fake news for marketers and advertisers said that companies such as Google are only part of the picture. According to her, it is their responsibility to spend it wisely, referring to the "advertisers' dollars", reported CBC.
She also pointed out that it is easier said than done since advertisers don't know all of the sites on which their ads run and it makes things difficult to weed out sites designed to serve misinformation. Bidel said when publishers can quickly create news sites, even if they are able to maintain a partial list of offending sites, there is no blacklist that is going to be able to keep up with fake news.
