India has the most fact checkers in the world: Irene Jay Liu, News Lab lead, APAC at Google

“Since then, we’ve seen the community of fact checkers grow in India to the point where India is actually the country that has the most fact checkers in the world that are certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN),” she said. “We want to ensure that the fact checks that they’re producing surface on our products. And so as a result, you can actually see fact checks on Google Search, Google News, as well as YouTube, in English and in Hindi.”

Liu said that as journalists are at the frontline of fighting misinformation and that it was with this in mind that the Google News Initiative (GNI) India Training Network was created. She said it was focused on bringing the skills of fact checking, digital safety and security and other topics to newsrooms where working journalists can teach others.

“We have 250 trainers all around the country who can train in more than 10 languages. And since we started this programme in 2018, we have trained 38,000 journalists, media educators, journalism students, and fact checkers all around the country,” she said. “We’re really excited about the expansion of this programme this year into new topics related to fact checking and fighting misinformation.”

She said that issues like how to use data to help enhance fact checking and how one can fact check topics like climate change, will be among some topics that are addressed in the upcoming programmes over the next few months.

On the policy front, Clement Wolf, Senior Public Policy Manager, Information Integrity at Google said that the company has policies in place that cover a range of harmful content and behaviours. These include hate speech to harassment and variations of misinformation and disinformation, among many more.

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“We keep evolving these policies over time in order to respond to new threats, or new opportunities to do good work,” he said. “Enforcing these policies at scale, is one of the challenging parts of operating platforms like ours.”

In order to do this, he said Google and the numerous platforms it operates like YouTube, for instance rely on flags or the notices that normal users or others flag as violating policies. Wolf said the company’s machine learning systems help it to do this work at scale but highlighted that context was critical while assessing a piece of content for misinformation or disinformation.

“We really rely on this complementarity between human reviewers who trained and understand the policy’s nuances and machine learning systems whose job is to elevate content for these people to review. And, of course, the outcome of the reviews informs the machine learning systems so they can do better over time.”

Wolf said that Google removed over 3.4 billion ads in 2021 and in the last quarter of 2021, it took action on close to 4 million channels. “We have policies for each of our services,” he explained. “These policies vary from service to service. Even though we all consider the same harms across different services, these services don’t have the same purposes or user expectation and so we might respond to these harms differently across services.”