Tech giant Google recently launched a $3 million Global Fund to fight misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.
The California-headquartered tech giant announced on its blog Tuesday that it has opened an Open Fund and has begun accepting applications from projects that aim to broaden the audience of fact checks, particularly with those who may be disproportionately affected by misinformation in mind.
The fund is global and open to news organizations of every size that have a proven track record in fact-checking and debunking activities, or partner with an organization with such recognition.
“We will prioritize collaborative projects with an interdisciplinary team and clear ways to measure success. For example, eligible applications might include a partnership between an established fact-checking project and a media outlet with deep roots in a specific community, or a collaborative technology platform for journalists and doctors to jointly source misinformation and publish fact checks,” the company said.
Google said the uncertainty and developing nature of the coronavirus pandemic continues to generate related misinformation that fact-checkers have been hard at work debunking falsehoods online.
To date, the company has reported nearly 10,000 fact checks about the pandemic currently showing up across their products.
While the COVID-19 infodemic has been global in nature, Google’s News and Information Credibility Lead Alexios Mantzarlis at the Google News Lab said misinformation has also been used to target specific populations.
Recently, since the start of the pandemic, the tech giant has worked to provide quality information and resources to help keep people safe, and to provide public health, scientists, and medical professionals with tools to combat the pandemic.
The company has also launched more than 200 new products, features, and initiatives—including the Exposure Notification API to assist contact tracing—and have pledged over $1 billion to assist users, customers, and partners around the world.
In a company blog post, Google has announced that they have launched a feature on its search engine that when people look up information for COVID-19 vaccines, the search will deliver a list of authorized vaccines in their location, as well as information panels on each individual vaccine. The company first rolled out this feature in the United Kingdom and will soon be implemented in other countries.
Since launching in March, the COVID-19 information panels on YouTube have also been viewed 400 billion times, making them an important source of authoritative information.
Around $250 million in Ad Grants were also given to help more than 100 government agencies around the world run critical public service announcements about COVID-19.
Grantees can use these funds throughout 2021, including for vaccine education and outreach campaigns, and we’re announcing today an additional $15 million in Ad Grants to the World Health Organization (WHO) to assist their global campaign.
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