Google says it is discontinuing its fact-check feature because it proved to be too faulty for public use, directly attributing the decision to an investigation by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The company has no date set for when it will return, if ever.
“We launched the reviewed claims feature at the end of last year as an experiment with the aim of helping people quickly learn more about news publications,” a spokeswoman for Google told TheDCNF, while also adding that TheDCNF was the catalyst for the move. “We said previously that we encountered challenges in our systems that maps fact checks to publishers, and on further examination it’s clear that we are unable to deliver the quality we’d like for users.”
There were two main problems with the fact-check widget, which appeared on the sidebar of Google’s search results for very few sites and publications.
First, the legitimate outlets chosen were virtually all ones with conservatives audiences. The Daily Caller, for example, was given such treatment, while sites like Vox, Slate, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones and several others clearly on the left side of the political spectrum were not. – READ MORE
[give_form id=”79809″] [divider][/divider]On Tuesday, The Daily Caller reported that Google had begun to target conservative media sites. Their preferred method: by showing fact-checks of those sites by particular left-wing media fact-checking sites like FactCheck.org, Politifact, and Climate Feedback. Such fact-checks were not provided for major left-wing media sites.
Only sites like Daily Caller, Daily Wire, The Federalist and Breitbart News are targeted; ThinkProgress, Slate, The Huffington Post, and similar avatars of left-wing viewpoint are only granted a “Topics they write about” category.
Suffice it to say that the use of left-wing fact-checkers as truth police is a massive step in favor of media bias, not against it. As Aaron Bandler of Daily Wire has written:
The problem is that these fact-checkers — PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, Snopes, Associated Press and ABC News — are all slanted to the left and have a bad habit of inserting their progressive opinions into “fact-checks” instead of simply being objective. – READ MORE
[divider][/divider]Former Google engineer James Damore has sued the tech giant, alleging that Google discriminates against conservatives, whites, and males in an effort to increase diversity at the company — and that employees who identify as conservative, white, or male, are made to feel inferior.
Damore was fired from Google after a memo he authored on the subject of male versus female engineers, went viral. In the memo, Damore argued that intrinsic differences between the male and female mind left men more able to handle the technical requirements of software engineering.
The opinion was, of course, controversial. But rather than engaging in dialogue about the science behind Damore’s theory, Google caved to crowd pressure and dismissed Damore who, subsequently, became a vocal critic of gender equality policies inside Silicon Valley.
Now, Damore says, he wants Google to pay for encouraging discrimination within its ranks.
In a lawsuit filed in California on Monday, Damore alleges that “employees who expressed views deviating from the majority view at Google on political subjects raised in the workplace and relevant to Google’s employment policies and its business, such as ‘diversity’ hiring policies, ‘bias sensitivity,’ or ‘social justice,’ were/are singled out, mistreated, and systematically punished and terminated from Google, in violation of their legal rights.” – READ MORE