Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) has decided to donate $6.5 million to help stop the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus. The funds will come from the Google News Initiative (GNI), which was established in 2018 to help support digital journalism.
According to Alexios Mantzarlis, lead at Google's News Lab, the company's $6.5 million in contributions are specifically intended to help organizations that specialize in fact-checking.
"This is really aimed at the misinformation fighting community, rather than journalism as a whole," said Mantzarlis. "This is for that subset that is dealing with misinformation head-on."
Benefactors of Google's $6.5 million investment include fact-checking organizations SciLine, First Draft, Meedan, PolitiFact, and Kaiser Health News, as well as organizations helping to stop the spread of misinformation worldwide, including the International Fact-Checking Network, Full Fact (Europe), Maldita.es (Europe), Correctiv (Germany), Data Leads (India), Africa Check (Nigeria), and LatamChequea (Latin America).
The importance of working with so many fact-checking groups across the world is apparent and clearly necessary, considering that so much of the same misinformation has the capacity to circulate across countries and languages within a short period of time. Spread throughout numerous platforms, a post that goes viral in one country can be seen going viral in another.
Google hopes that allowing their contributions to help on a global scale will prove beneficial given this reality.
"I've never seen anything like this, where something in India is almost identically phrased as something in the United States or in my home country of Italy," said Mantzarlis. "The posts are literally making the same types of claims, transforming so the person who's allegedly the expert quoted in the WhatsApp message is no longer the nurse from Milan but your uncle the doctor in Seattle who's seeing the hospital system collapse."
When it comes to Big Tech companies stepping up their contributions to help stop the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus, Google isn't the only one. Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) recently announced it would contribute $1 million to support fact-checking organizations.