The world is now aware that Google and Facebook have gone hard on fake news sites and illegal, misleading and harmful ads. The issue came into light after it was seen that fake news considerably affected the US presidential campaign.

While Google and Facebook have taken different approaches towards tackling fake news and ads, Google's approach is more expansive, deep and futuristic. Google has put up a system that can be modified, updated and bettered as more and more scammers come up with new techniques to make money through fake ads.

According to Tech Times, Facebook faced a tremendous backlash when it came to fake news reporting. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to consider using only curated news to stop fake ones from getting viral. Google has taken a hard approach by bringing together all its policy experts and engineers and punishing wrongdoers. Google reportedly took down 1.7 billion fake advertisements in 2016 and banned 200 publishers in the last two months of the same year. Google Blog has explained in detail how the company handled the issue.

Google expanded its Ad Policy and enhanced its technologies. It uprooted the main actors of illegal product ads. Advertisements on illegal pharmaceutical products that resulted in healthcare violations were taken down immediately. Gambling ads also faced the axe in countries where it is illegal to gamble. Google's Director of Product Management and Sustainable Ads, Scott Spencer, revealed that Google "disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations [and] 17 million bad ads for illegal gambling violations in 2016."

Ads relying only on shock value, miracle weight loss ads and other misleading ads were removed. About 80 million bad ads were taken down and from now on, advertisers need to provide sufficient information on products and services for an informed buying decision. Even the mobile platform was thoroughly cleansed. Google disabled nearly 23,000 self-clicking ads on the platform. Ads that are presented as news but only take the reader to scam sites, have also been dealt with. They are known as Tabloid Cloakers and they are no more.