How PageRank Can Fight Fake News
http://www.cio.in/feature/can-algorithms-really-tackle-fake-news-fiasco
This article is about the growing phenomenon of fake news and how Google along with other search engine giants can combat it. It talks about a University of Oxford study done on the recent US presidential election and how there was more manipulation through big data and bots used to sway voters than ever before, allowing the world to see social media manipulations at its worst. It talks about how the tech titans have a huge fake news problem, and how Google is leading the charge against it with its PageRank algorithm. Because PageRank ranks internet websites based on the pages that link them, Google can easily trace back the fake news to its original source. The article then talks about human intervention is necessary in order to stop fake news.
This resource connects with the class material because we studied and used the PageRank algorithm. It connects in an interesting way because the talking point was something that wasn’t necessarily obvious when learning the algorithm: it’s a great way to keep track of where things are coming from on the web. While we knew that websites’ PageRanks were determined by the number of other websites that linked it, I never thought about the fact that it is actually keeping track of which sites link it. Initially, I would think that this is a bad thing because of privacy, but I now see how it can be used as a tool of accountability. It allows us to trace the roots of almost any web posting and get to the bottom of the fake news epidemic.