Google has removed the term 'fake news' from its advertiser rules

Google no longer uses the term "fake news" in its advertising policy.

The company has quietly erased the only explicit mention of the phrase from the rules for its AdSense platform. This comes just months after it announced that it would no longer serve ads to sites that traffic in misinformation.

The language was removed from a section of the "prohibited content" guide in which the company gives examples of potential rule violations. A now-deleted sentence had described "deceptively presenting fake news articles as real" as one possible scenario.

The change was first spotted by progressive watchdog group Media Matters, which recently confronted the search giant with a list of 20 supposed fake news sites that still display ads from Google's network as of this month.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

It's possible that Google decided the term "fake news" was too ambiguous.

A Google spokesperson said the language adjustment doesn't reflect any change in its actual policy.

"We have not changed our misrepresentative content policy in any way," a spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

"The policy language remains the same and we are continuing to enforce it vigilantly, just as when we launched it a few months ago. We've removed a large number of misleading and deceptive sites from our network as a result."

As for the group's list of alleged violators, the company said it wouldn't comment on individual cases.

Google first announced the ban just after the presidential election as it and other online platforms came under increased scrutiny for the role they played in spreading false political stories.

But some have begun question whether the term "fake news" itself still holds any real meaning now that it's increasingly being co-opted to describe any article with which one disagrees.