Google Searches for “Final Election Results” Surface Fake News

Fake news and hoaxes have circulated throughout this whole election season (something that even Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged in a public post on Facebook). And even though the election is over, the fake news is still not stopping — and that was made abundantly clear on Google.

As Gizmodo reports, one of the top search results for "final election results" and "final election count" is an alt-right blog titled "70 News" featuring the headline, "Final election 2016 numbers: Trump won both popular ( 62.9 m -62.2 m ) and electoral college votes ( 306-232)… Hey change.org, scrap your loony petition now!" Yeah, Google, that sounds legit.

(For the record, Hillary Clinton is the one who's ahead re: the popular vote.)

The Washington Post pointed out that the "70 News" site is extremely similar to a previously discredited pro-Trump fake news site called Prntly, which was founded by Alex Portelli (who was sentenced to prison for selling ecstasy). President-elect Donald Trump promoted Prntly on his Twitter page earlier this year.

The issue was first brought to light by Twitter user Asa Raskin:

The "70 News" site includes conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton's health, paid anti-Trump protesters, and al-Qaeda. Here's an example of how grossly incorrect this site is:

“Knowing the Democrat media have been dragging their liberal feet giving Michigan to Trump – finally they did, with Arizona finally declared two days ago – Trump now has the 309. Except for the twitter posts, the popular vote number still need to be updated in Wikipedia or MSM media – which may take another few days because the liberals are still reeling and recovering from Trump-shock victory. If I’m wrong, I won’t hesitate to change the numbers. It’s the job of the establishment media to tell the people the final numbers when it’s out there already.”

You can check CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, or any number of mainstream media sites for real-time updated election results. "70 News" is sourcing its numbers from this guy's Twitter page, according to Mediaite.

It's not clear why Google keeps promoting this site as a top search result among other, legitimate sources, but it's likely because of the search engine's top-secret algorithm, and the way this site has been optimized with keywords and metadata. We reached out to Google for comment. A spokesperson said: "The goal of Search is to provide the most relevant and useful results for our users. In this case we clearly didn’t get it right, but we are continually working to improve our algorithms."

This piece was updated at 8:52 a.m. on Nov. 15 to include Google's statement.

Related: Mark Zuckerberg Promises to Crack Down on Fake News on Facebook

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