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Bing now shows fact checks in search results

Bing now shows fact checks in search results

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Bing fact check
Bing showing a fact check from Snopes

Following Google’s lead earlier this year, Bing has added fact checking tags to search results.

A fact check label might now appear below results from Snopes, PolitFact, and other fact checking organizations, making it much easier to see their ruling on any given claim. Rather than having to click into the link, the site’s verdict — true, false, or somewhere in between — will now be pulled out into the search preview.

False stories still show up unadorned

The feature should help to call out incorrect stories, but only to an extent. If an illegitimate news story makes it into your Bing search results (or Google, for that matter), it’ll still appear unadorned. The hope, however, is that a fact checking article might appear alongside it, and with the article’s verdict pulled out and bolded, readers might see and take heed before clicking through.

Like on Google, the fact checking labels aren’t limited to just the major fact checking sites — there’s some common code that websites can embed to let search engines pull out their information. That leaves the tag open for abuse by, of course, the same people making these false stories in the first place. But Bing says it isn’t guaranteeing that all websites that include a fact check tag will have their fact checks displayed; instead, it’ll try to confirm that sites “follow commonly accepted criteria for fact checks” before showing them.

The spread of fact checking labels follows the tumultuous US election, which saw false articles and Russian propaganda reach voters to a shocking new extent. This happened most infamously over social media, like Facebook, and Facebook has since begun adding its own fact checking tools. Google, meanwhile, began rolling out fact checking tags to its news sections late last year, before bringing them to search in April.