Alphabet chief executive Eric Schmidt says Google and other tech companies must act against state-run Russian news agencies to stop spread of falsehoods

Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has said the search engine is preparing to take action against state-run Russian news agencies, including Russia Today and Sputnik, which are accused of spreading propaganda by US intelligence agencies.

“We’re working on detecting this kind of scenario ... and de-ranking those kinds of sites,” Schmidt said, in response to a question at an event in Halifax, Canada. “It’s basically RT and Sputnik. We’re well aware and we’re trying to engineer the systems to prevent it.”

Google has faced criticism for promoting the two news sites by including them in its Google News service – a curated list of legitimate news sites – as well as other algorithmic services that select and promote news.

Schmidt described the previous approach of the technology industry to misinformation as “naive”, arguing that “almost all the things in Alphabet and the other tech companies can be understood as the maturation of what we do.

“Ten years ago I thought that everyone would be able to deal with the internet because the internet, as we all knew, was full of falsehoods as well as truths. But faced with the data, from what we’ve seen from Russia in 2016 and with other actors around the world, we have to act.”

According to Motherboard, which first reported Schmidt’s comments, he claimed the Russian disinformation strategy was easy to combat, since it is based on “amplification around a message” of information that is “repetitive, exploitative, false, [or] likely to have been weaponised”.

“My own view is that these patterns can be detected, and that they can be taken down or deprioritised.”

But he denied going as far as to ban the two news sites. “We don’t want to ban the sites. That’s not how we operate,” Schmidt said. “I am strongly not in favour of censorship. I am very strongly in favour of ranking. It’s what we do.

“It’s a very legitimate question as to how we rank, A or B, right? And we do the best we can in millions and millions of rankings every day.”

Russia Today’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, issued a statement in response noting that Google’s own internal review system had found that the news site had broken no rules.

“Mr Schmidt should use Google,” she said, “as his colleagues admitted three weeks ago that RT did not violate any rules of their platform.”



A Guardian investigation revealed on Monday the extent of Russian penetration of the British media. At least 80 times, news sites including the Telegraph, Metro and Buzzfeed embedded or quoted tweets known to have been written by a notorious state-backed “troll army” based in St Petersburg.