Google commits to removing Russian news outlets
Following criticism of Russia’s online activities designed to influence Americans and now other nations, Eric Schmidt has gone on record to say that Google will no longer classify certain Russian sites as news. Specifically, Schmidt mentions that Sputnik and RT are the two major offenders.
Sputnik and RT are both owned directly by the Russian government but are not likely to be blocked from search entirely. “We don’t want to ban the sites. That’s not how we operate,” Schmidt declared and went on to clarify that he is strongly against censorship of the internet. Both Russian sites are also supported by Google Adsense, so it seems that the relationship with Google is good enough to allow revenue sharing to continue.
Even though Schmidt did directly call out two different Russian sites for the “spread of misinformation,” he did not offer any definitive actions that would be taken. There is still little information from Google on how it has changed policies after discovering that Russian ads were appearing on a number of its platforms, besides minor changes to YouTube.
RT was removed from YouTube’s premium ad service around the time that Congress began investigating possible ties to Russia. Currently, RT still has over 2 million subscribers on YouTube and is just as free to post content as any other users.
How Google decides to combat potentially fraudulent news in search remains to be seen. No matter the decision made, the size and scope of Google News will greatly impact what content is easily accessible to the general public.
He also said some fresh sets of eyes would be helpful in tackling security issues and “a new set of brains and talent” is needed.
“We are working on detecting and de-ranking those kinds of sites – it’s basically RT and Sputnik“, Schmidt said, referring to two news sites USA officials have blamed for interfering in the 2016 presidential election by publishing information critical of the USA government, including hacked emails obtained by Wikileaks.
He noted there are a huge number of computer scientists coming out of the world’s top universities who can provide leadership.
During the discussion, Schmidt also claimed that he is strongly against censorship.
The Executive Chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, said the search engine giant will make news articles from Russian-funded news sites hard to find on its platform. It’s what we do”, said Schmidt.”It’s a very legitimate question as to how we rank, A or B, right?
RT and Sputnik editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan criticized Google’s decision.
“We are working on detecting and de-ranking those kinds of sites – it’s basically RT and Sputnik“.
Last month, Twitter made a similar move, banning news outlets RT and Sputnik from advertising with any of their accounts.