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Google won't add fact checks despite new EU law
(www.axios.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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I do have to wonder, how could Google (or any search engine) be expected to perform fact checking on search results? It seems technically impossible.
Google doesn't just provide links, it scrubs content out of sites (with scripts before, now with LLMs) and presents it as Google's own content.
If they do that, they should be responsible if the content break laws.
Oh, yes I agree they should be responsible for anything they generate themselves, but if it's just a regurgitation of content that their web crawler pulled from a website which then appeared in search results then it's the original website that should be responsible.
It seems like a heavy-handed enforcement of this policy could just break web search functionality entirely.
Downvoters have no idea how web indexes work.
So if Google pulls out the wrong part of your website and gives dangerous information, you'd be responsible?
Well, why is that 'dangerous information' available to be pulled out of my website in the first place?
"You don't want to drink bleach on a sunny day" could be understood as "It's okay to drink bleach on a cloudy day"
Um... "could be"...? Literally anything anybody writes could be misinterpreted, so I don't really see the point of this line of argument, nor any value in legislating around it.
My guy, leaving out context can change whether information is dangerous or not.
Say I have a website that explains how to get clothes clean, and I recommend bleach. I also have a subsection "Danger: things you should never do with bleach!" listing dangerous things, e.g. "drinking bleach". Now Google pulls out only that list without the heading.
In your world, I'm responsible for Google showing information in the wrong context, which is nuts. I can't be expected to write everything so it's unambiguous, no matter how small a snippet you extract.