Eric Schmidt has made news with his latest announcement that Google is working on ways to ‘derank’ Russian media in the search engine’s results.
At this weekend’s Halifax International Security Forum in Canada, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and current executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc., discussed Google’s efforts to deal with the apparent rise of fake news. Specifically, Schmidt was talking about how the search engine giant might limit the spread of ‘Russian Propaganda.’ Mr. Schmidt said Google might ‘derank’ fake news stories, going as far as mentioning Russian news stations Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik.
‘We are working on detecting and deranking those kinds of sites – it’s basically RT and Sputnik,’ Schmidt said. ‘We are well of aware of it, and we are trying to engineer the systems to prevent that [the content being delivered to wide audiences]. But we don’t want to ban the sites – that’s not how we operate.’
Schmidt said Google was not in favor of censorship, but would rather focus on ranking. ‘I am very strongly in favor of ranking. It’s what we do,’ he stated. ‘It’s a very legitimate question as to how we rank, A or B, right? And we do the best we can in millions and millions of rankings every day.’
This post was published at The Daily Sheeple on NOVEMBER 22, 2017.
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