Google tells users Obama planning a “communist coup” in fake news scandal

Google (NASDAQ:GOOAV) has come under fire for spreading fake news through its “featured snippets in search” functionality.

The search engine answers straightforward questions without users having to click a further link. Over the weekend, Google was found to have taken information from the web as fact without the presence of the other search results from the internet to provide the necessary clues that the answers from these sites are likely to be misleading.

The most controversial answer Google provided over the weekend was in responce to the question, ‘Is Obama planning a coup’. Google provided a quick answer from a site called Secrets of the Fed which stated: “According to details exposed in Western Centre for Journalism’s exclusive video, not only could Obama be in bed with the communist Chinese, but Obama may in fact be planning a communist coup d’état at the end of his term in 2016!”

A Google spokesperson has said: “Featured Snippets in Search provide an automatic and algorithmic match to a given search query, and the content comes from third-party sites. Unfortunately, there are instances when we feature a site with inappropriate or misleading content. When we are alerted to a Featured Snippet that violates our policies, we work quickly to remove them, which we have done in this instance. We apologise for any offence this may have caused.”

Other fake news shared by Google included statements claiming that monosodium glutamate causes brain damage, Barack Obama is the King of the US, and US president Warren Harding was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Google’s spreading of fake news has considered serious when it is taken “true and accurate information about things going on in the world” among most 12- to 15-year-olds according to Ofcom’s recent research.

The search engine has so far managed to avoid the scandal surrounding “fake news”, which has instead landed affected Facebook, due to the their use of algorithmic newsfeed.