Two Penn State professors receive $300,000 to develop technology to tackle fake news

Representational image.[/caption]The university says information sciences and technology professor Dongwon Lee and communications professor S. Shyam Sundar are working on the project. Lee says fake news "has been around for decades" but has been "exacerbated" on the internet and social media platforms.

The professors plan to investigate "characteristic indicators of fake news" and develop complex formulas that will enable digital devices to recognize those indicators and purge stories that contain them.

Sundar has researched the psychology of online news consumption for two decades. The Associated Press and other media outlets have made efforts to point out fake news, such as a recent social media headline claiming Hillary Clinton lost the popular vote.

Meanwhile, Google has sprinkled some new ingredients into its search engine in an effort to prevent bogus information and offensive suggestions from souring its results. The changes have been in the works for four months, but Google hadn't publicly discussed most of them until now. The announcement in a blogpost reflects Google's confidence in a new screening system designed to reduce the chances that its influential search engine will highlight untrue stories about people and events, a phenomenon commonly referred to as "fake news."

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With inputs from Associated Press