Expanding Fact Checking at Google
This presents an issue that we&#x27;ve seen a lot of this political season...<p>Anonymous sources, how do you &quot;fact check&quot; them? This season has been full of supposed leaks from the FBI, White House staffers, intelligence community, DOJ, and beyond. But a single publication claiming something with an anonymous source isn&#x27;t fact check-able. Then what you see is second publications posting the same story (particularly dedicated political sites like Politico&#x2F;The Hill) but their only source is the first publication. Then a third publication runs it only saying that X Y and Z reported the story, implying that it is true just by virtue of the level of attention.<p>Everyone is talking about &quot;alt news&quot; (typically far right news) which is legitimately problematic, but few have been discussing the problematic way anonymous sources have been used and reported. It isn&#x27;t too dissimilar from this XKCD except replace Wikipedia with third tier publications and broadcasters[0]. You can seemingly get a story verified just by repeating it enough, that&#x27;s a problem.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;978&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;978&#x2F;</a>