Thanks, Jason.
This committee heard previously from us about our various collaborations with news publishers in Canada and around the world. Collaboration and partnership are central to our approach to the news. Globally, Google Search and Google News send over 10 billion clicks a month to publishers' websites for free, representing an opportunity for publishers to grow and monetize their audience.
Google News, our service that aggregates news headlines and links to sources, is a white-list service. Publishers are reviewed and approved before they are eligible to be featured as part of our news corpus. Google News features over 75,000 publishers globally, including almost 2,000 Canadian publishers. Our review process is rigorous and is aimed at separating news websites that conduct original journalism and analysis from non-news websites such as pure news aggregators, marketing, content not dealing with current events, or websites that deceive users about their ownership or their primary purpose.
To be clear, reviewers do not assess the quality or accuracy of each news website nor do they assess or rank political viewpoint or ideology.
Google News aims to provide diverse perspectives on news stories. Under each news story, Google News offers links to several other articles from different news publishers on the same story. This exposes users to different perspectives on the subjects that interest them and allows them to select for themselves which publishers' accounts they wish to read.
Further, Google News highlights content from local news sources by including a “local source” tag to showcase local coverage of major stories. Not only does this allow for the local section in Google News to link to stories in regional papers, it ensures that national or international stories include a local perspective where available, and it is consistent with our goal to surface diverse perspectives.
We don't just work with publishers on Google News. We help them leverage the best of the web. News Lab is an initiative from Google that is wholly dedicated to helping news publishers make the most of digital opportunities.
To do this, we offer face-to-face training in newsrooms, online resources for journalists—notably, including Google Trends, which we provide based on input from many publishers—and we support research that can be of help for publishers.
We've also been partnering with the broader news industry to work on the problem of verification for several years now. For instance, we are a founding member of the First Draft News coalition, an organization that is helping efforts to improve social news gathering and verification. We also support the Trust Project, which is investigating ways to distinguish authoritative journalism from promotional content and fakery, and effectively signal its trustworthiness.
For many years, Google News has marked links with specific source labels such as “opinion content”, “user-generated content”, or “satire”, which help readers understand what they are about to read and encourage them to consider the source and nature of the information. More recently, we launched a new label in Google News for fact-checking. This tag highlights news that's been fact-checked and verified by authoritative organizations, including news publishers and independent fact-checking organizations. The tag is currently available in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and France, with more countries, including Canada, soon to come.
The fact-check industry has reached a level of growth that makes this kind of work possible and we are strong supporters of fact-checking initiatives. Google has provided support for more than 10 different efforts looking at fact-checking and authentication, adding six new projects at the end of last year. We are very enthusiastic about the future of our collaboration with this growing fact-check community and its implementation across our platforms.
We look forward to sharing more with the committee about our progress on this front at a future meeting.
This leads us to our last point.