As India prepares for 2024 elections, fact-checking has taken a centre stage to help people access accurate information they need for informed participation. To support the movement, Google has launched Shakti, India Election Fact-Checking Collective to detect online misinformation, including deepfakes, and to create a common repository that news publishers can use to tackle misinformation at scale.

The nationwide network will be driven by DataLEADS, in collaboration with the Misinformation Combat Alliance, The Quint, VishvasNews, Boom, Factly, and Newschecker. The initiative is also backed by Google News Initiative (GNI) launched in 2018.

Until the elections in India conclude, the project will help the publishers collaborate to fact-check in multiple Indian languages and formats, including videos. Moreover, the project will provide news organisations training in advanced fact-checking methodologies, deepfake detection, and the latest Google tools like the Fact Check Explorer, to help with the verification processes.

Following the launch, the Fact-Checking Collective will onboard additional partners and expand its outreach across various Indian regions. The collective will continue to prioritise publishers generating original content in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali and Marathi.

Even though Google has made plenty of similar efforts to upgrade the state of journalism in the country, the big tech company has also managed to muffle the voices raising issues. The tech behemoth reigning the digital infrastructure has been often found tinkering with the way it makes profits through news organisations, especially the local ones. Google has been accused of unfair compensation for publishers. Furthermore, with the company’s policies local news often struggles to hit the top results on the search engine. 

With initiatives such as Shakti and GNI, Google is trying to do the right thing but its closed door activities paint a different picture altogether. The Mountain-View giant is also being raised fingers at for planning to make its ‘News’ tab redundant. Google is currently testing out a version of Search that did not include a “News” filter. The unannounced test caught many by surprise.