It turns out that Facebook isn't the only media company with a fake news problem. On Sunday night, Twitter user Aza Raskin pointed out that the top result in a Google search for election results was a fake news article falsely claiming that Donald Trump won the popular vote.
"Reality," wrote Raskin in the tweet, "is what people collectively believe."
Reality is what people collectively believe. pic.twitter.com/KJANDTkUzA
— Aza Raskin (@aza) November 14, 2016
The discovery made waves online, and by Monday afternoon, Google felt compelled to issue a statement. "The goal of Search is to provide the most relevant and useful results for our users," said the spokesman. "In this case we clearly didn't get it right, but we are continually working to improve our algorithms."
The fake article—from a website called "70 News," with a tagline that reads "sharing news that matters to you"—is listed underneath the search engine's own calculation of the final results.
The article sited its one source—a tweet from a share market trader:
Final #Election2016 Results By Numbers:-
— Michael (@Koxinga8) November 12, 2016
#PopularVote
#electoralvotes pic.twitter.com/uKZevQvPfK
The Google dustup comes after a weekend in which Mark Zuckerberg took issue with allegations that the proliferation of fake news on Facebook had unfairly influenced the presidental election.
"Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic," Zuckerberg wrote. "Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes. The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics. Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.
