Yahoo Acquires Source Credibility Algorithms With Latest Acquisition
A search engine company acquires The Factual, an algorithm-driven news rating company that assesses the credibility of news sources.
Yahoo announced that it would purchase The Factual, a news rating agency that evaluates media credibility and bias. Yahoo will use this score to give users additional insight into the content’s accuracy and reliability.
The search engine company stated via press release that the acquisition “continues Yahoo’s commitment to bringing trusted news to its nearly 900 million consumers worldwide and builds upon the company’s future vision for news.”
The deal’s financial terms, which were closed on August 23rd, were not disclosed.
Purchase demonstrates a commitment to fighting disinformation
Although Factual only has eight employees, Yahoo news sees great potential in its services. Yahoo has made a significant investment in fighting fake news by acquiring Factual.
In an environment of increasing information overload and social media, misinformation has become a growing concern.
Yahoo describes the scoring system as a “first-of-its-kind analysis of news stories,” surpassing fact-checking initiatives by Google and Facebook YouTube.
Matt Sanchez, President & General Manager of Yahoo Home Ecosystem, stated in the release, “The combination of Yahoo’s journalism with our publishing partners’ content will bring a new degree of transparency to Yahoo users’ decision-making on news sources.”
Current statistics show that The Factual scores more than 10,000 English articles daily. This is based on a daily newsletter and a website that displays live trends.
Algorithm Scores Latest Using Artificial Intelligence
The Factual was launched in 2019 and uses artificial intelligence to score news stories using four criteria.
- Site quality measures the site’s ability to produce high-scoring and well-sourced articles.
- Author expertise is based on past papers and determines author expertise.
- Article tone is a measure of how opinionated the article’s language is.
- Source quality measures the quality and variety of sources and can be used to generate meaningful quotes.
These score’s are used to calculate a weighted mean, then displayed to the reader with notes about the political leanings.
Low scores can indicate credibility concerns. These are cases where facts may not support opinions. A higher score means that the article is trustworthy.
Although these scores will initially appear only on Yahoo News, they may provide Yahoo News’ 107.7 million monthly users ratings for thousands of aggregated news.