Google is expanding its efforts to promote news literacy and fight misinformation with new tools to provide users with more context and diverse viewpoints when searching for news stories. The company is introducing a new Perspectives carousel, which will offer viewpoints from experts, journalists and other relevant voices on a given news topic. The feature will be available soon in the US for English users.
Google is also adding an “About this author” feature to its “About this result” tool, which will show creators’ backgrounds and encourage the use of trustworthy sources. The company is rolling out the author info worldwide in English, and it will also be available in the Perspectives carousel.
The company is also upgrading some of its existing features. “About this result” will be available for all search languages in the days ahead. Advisories for rapidly developing stories are coming to French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese users, too. And if users put an organization’s web address into a search, they’ll now get “About this page” info toward the top to help them determine whether or not the site is worth visiting.
Google’s new features are part of its larger efforts to fight misinformation and promote news literacy through education, fact-checking and supplemental info. By providing more context and diverse perspectives, the company hopes to help users escape media bubbles that reinforce biases and encourage them to double-check content before accepting it as true. While it remains to be seen how well the new tools will work in practice, they may be particularly useful for students wanting to verify the quality of their sources for research papers and essays.
