Fake news are problems for many people that seek for the truth. On the internet where its contents are essentially created by its many users, plenty of them aren't authentic and can't be trusted.
Two of the largest internet companies have pledged to ban websites that create fake news after they were accused of spreading false and incendiary articles about the U.S. presidential election. To do this, they announced their aim to stop the fake news spread by eliminating the way those websites make money.
The most obvious is by showing ads. So the two are banning ads on them, eliminating their source of income.
Google made the first move, saying that it would ban websites that spread fake news from using its advertising services. A few hours later, Facebook updated its Facebook Audience Network policy that already said to not display ads in sites that show illegal content, to include fake news websites.
Many web articles that create fake news, are indexed by Google; got popular, and eventually spread on Facebook to get even more viral and made it to populate the News Feed and Trending Topics.
As an example, over the weekend, the number one Google hit for the search "final election count" was an article from a website claiming that Donald Trump had won the popular vote by 700,000 votes. In fact, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.
With the attempt to stop fake news from ever created by putting out their source of revenue, the two's decisions were a clear signal that the tech behemoths could no longer ignore the growing outcry over their power in distributing information.
While the two's move can certainly limit the number of sources of fake news from ever growing up, it has also raised new questions about how Google and Facebook, as well as other online platforms, to have little editorial control over the news they deliver to their billions of users.
And because Google and Facebook have somehow become the police to control contents flowing inside its networks. This also makes them the reluctant judges that decide what is misleading, hateful or true. Such move could alienate users, hurt advertisers revenue and fuel a debate on how much influence they should have over websites on the internet.
Google and Facebook are two giants on the web. And as the two powerful beings that control most of the internet's influence, the debate comes as "do people really want Google and Facebook to decide what we can talk about?"
Google and Facebook have chosen a practice where they depend on computers to do many of the contents' ranking and placing. They didn't opt for hiring human editors because they believe this would make them vulnerable to criticisms of human bias.
While computers can do some jobs a lot better than us humans, most people don't live in Silicon Valley. Those people don't care about how computers work or how capable they are in delivering contents fast and easy. What they want is the truth. So fake news aren't something they're expecting from tech giants.
Those people are increasingly clamoring the two tech giants to take a more active role in scrutinizing the spread of information, especially those that are deceptive.
But this can be difficult for them. Both Google and Facebook aren't the gatekeeper of the web's information, but they do drive an enormous share of attention from news consumers around the world. They have struggled to find automated solutions to take down fake news because there isn't a clear line between true or false news on the web.
What they need to do, is to figure out a way to make some editorial mechanisms with a scale that goes along with their responsibility.
Google accounts to about 40 percent of all traffic delivered to news website, and out of a nearly 1.2 billion daily active Facebook users, almost half them rely on the social network for news.