The crackdown on fake news is heating on as Google is saying it has banned a whooping 200 publishers of fake news stories from accessing its advertising service, Adsense.
Google released the numbers on Wednesday as a part of a blog post from Scott Spencer, director of product management for sustainable ads.
The tech giant has faced repeated criticism over its handling of fake news stories, including allowing a fake news website to rise to the top of its results displaying an incorrect story claiming that President Trump had won the popular vote.
In his post explaining how Google attempted to crack down on “bad ads, sites and scammers,” Spencer explained that Google had expanded its policies against misleading websites in November, leading to the crackdown.
“From November to December 2016, we reviewed 550 sites that were suspected of misrepresenting content to users, including impersonating news organizations,” Spencer wrote, adding that “We took action against 340 of them for violating our policies, both misrepresentation and other offenses, and nearly 200 publishers were kicked out of our network permanently”.
In total, Google took down 1.7 billion ads that they found in violation of their policies in 2016, more than double the 780 million they removed in 2015.