The Silicon Review ^Asia

Google will train journalists to tackle down the spread of fake news in India. Journalists from 30 Indian cities will be trained on topics like fact-checking and online verification. The announcement was made public on Thursday.

The tech behemoth has joined hands with Internews, a non-profit organization and DataLeads to conduct the training sessions. The programme will take place from February 26 to April 6 and will be conducted in several languages like Hindi, English, Bengali, Tamil, Telegu, Marathi, Odia, and Malayalam.

The participants will be trained on a few other topics other than fact-checking and online verification that include data visualization, journalist digital safety, and operating Youtube for election coverage.

The government of India has warned the social media sites not to influence the country’s electoral process ahead of the upcoming general elections. Apart from that, it has proposed new rules for the IT, wherein online platforms, messaging apps, and social media are mandated to deploy tools to curb unlawful contents. 

Other than the new programme for professional journalists and freelancers, Google will also provide training to Journalism graduates.

The company intends to train an additional 10,000 journalists this year itself.

In the past couple of months, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have become more serious about transparency, and since then they have taken stringent measure to curb the spread of fake news before the general elections.

This programme will definitely boost the journalists.