Google’s New ‘Fact-Checker’ Is Partisan Garbage

Consider the case of a woman named Eileen Wellstone. Out of many thousands of pieces published by The Federalist over the past four years, a single one mentions the name Eileen Wellstone. That article, detailing the sordid history of Bill Clinton, mentions her name exactly once: “Another woman, Eileen Wellstone, claimed Clinton raped her while he was at Oxford University in the late 1960s.”

For some reason, in this “reviewed claim” against The Federalist, Google sends the reader to a Snopes fact-check that argues that Clinton wasn’t expelled from Oxford over this alleged rape — a point I concede sounds completely accurate and is also an assertion that no one has ever made in this publication.

So the question is, does Google tag every article that relays accusations of sexual misconduct or rape as “unproven,” or just the ones against Bill Clinton? Or is the mention of Wellstone specifically worthy of a claim? The Wellstone case has not only been cited in all types of publications (and not in efforts to debunk it, either; 1,2,3,4,5, and so on) but by The Washington Post’s own fact-checker.

In a 2016 article detailing allegations against Bill Clinton that might be brought up by then-candidate Donald Trump, WaPo notes, “Eileen Wellstone says she was assaulted by Clinton when he was a student at Oxford University in 1969.” There is virtually no difference between that statement and the one published in The Federalist. Not that Google search engines users would know this when they search for the influential newspaper.

Or take another purported fact-check regarding climate change, which creates the impression that there’s something inaccurate about a specific arguable claim because the larger notions about the topic happen to be true.

What’s most amusing about this fact-check is that Google sends people who searched for “The Federalist” to an article correcting a claim made by someone on CNN, an outlet that, somehow, even though they apparently feature contributors who make questionable claims about science, is spared from search-engine truth-police grilling.

Moreover, the quote featured in the “reviewed claim” section is not even in The Federalist article. Google’s go-to site, Climate Feedback, an ideologically motivated site itself, argues that “Observed warming since the 1970s is consistent with climate model projections.” This is at the very least an arguable contention. Feel free to use your Google search engine to find thousands of pieces debating the accuracy modeling over the decades. This seems to be a normal, appropriate, and completely scientific debate to be engaged in.