Google enters the line of breaking news with a new feature

Google has been developing Big Moments for more than a year to keep up-to-date with events in a way that could change the way users read news, Android Police reported.

The feature will provide insight into current events by providing more historical contexts for important and key events as they occur, from health crises and terrorism to entertainment and sporting events.

It also attempts to highlight the most reliable details about a specific incident in real time, such as accident death and injury statistics, and update them as new information becomes available, and could also include government data on the frequency of major events, such as mass shootings or natural disasters.

The company tested some of these features during the Kabul attacks in August, and began showing snippets of information from Wikipedia, the scale of the event, and the number of infections.

While the Google News platform relies on algorithms and artificial intelligence to display its news content, Google will have to make editorial decisions in Big Moments.

According to the website “The Invermination”, which was the first to talk about Google’s development of this feature, the continued reliance on computational decisions and their inclusion in algorithms and policies will be a major challenge.

The site explained that describing and naming events as they occur would be risky from an editorial point of view, and not without challenges, for example when does a protest become a riot? What is the definition of a terrorist attack? And when is the appropriate time to give this label to a specific event?

This effort will expose Google to more political scrutiny and societal debate about the accuracy and impact of the content it chooses at a time when it is already facing criticism for its dominance of online search and advertising.

"The launch of 'Big Moments' will bring Google closer to making editorial decisions facing news content makers," said Irina Raiko, director of the Internet Ethics Program at Santa Clara University in California. and based on signals that are fed into algorithms and policies.”