Beware of Google’s Fake News

Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) Google would like us all to believe that, as a corporate citizen, it is above reproach and is genuinely interested in protecting the integrity of news information for its users. Nothing could be more misleading.

Google consistently publishes fake news under its Google News service, and furthermore publishes advertising in its news database in contravention of its own Terms of Use. That this practice is supported by Google itself in an effort to continue to publish advertising performance numbers to its shareholders is not surprising.

But what is unconscionable is that they do so in rampant volumes without the slightest disclosure of the fact, and while publishing misleading guidance to its users that it itself does not follow.

The internet’s immature regulatory structure is largely responsible for Google’s ability to flaunt rules and laws governing legacy news organizations.

Here are some examples of advertising copy formatted to masquerade as news items in the Google News index:

1. One of the most prolific offenders of Google’s News guidelines is Motley Fool. They have mastered the art of writing news copy that, inserted above advertising copy, manages to pass itself off to readers as a legitimate news item: 
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3. https://www.fool.ca/2017/10/05/canopy-growth-corp-diversifies-its-product-offering-to-boost-future-revenue/
4. After a few paragraphs of re-worded previously published news from public sources, the advertisement attempts to channel the user into a subscription service, which is the end objective of almost every single Motley Fool advertisement that Google insists on listing in its Google News Index.
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6. Another Fake News site, AmigoBulls is merely a click-bait farm designed to generate ad revenue for Google. See this example:
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8. https://amigobulls.com/articles/79715-blackberry-ltd-bbry-stock-is-up-20-time-to-book-profits-now
9. There is literally nothing in this advertisement that constitutes news, as it is all regurgitated from publicly available sources.
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11. Even Yahoo News has become duplicitous in Google’s fraudulent presentation of advertising in the form of “news”. See this example of a Motley Fool advertisement, republished in its entirety, from a Google News listed version:
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13. https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/could-game-changer-blackberry-ltd-115623577.html

There are hundreds of millions of such examples. As a “news” provider, Google is right up there with Breitbart and other organizations that don’t actually publish anything original – they just repurpose publicly available information, and wrap it up and submit to Google News to achieve some other self-interested outcome, be it to click on an ad, or influence thinking.

So the next time Google makes a claim about protecting the interests of its readers, know that this claim is utterly false, and Google, as an organization, is as corrupt as the come.

We recommend bypassing Google News and Google Search altogether. If you want real news, the only way to guarantee that it is legitimate is to go directly to news publishers’ sites.