Google's Political Lie Predictor

This sounds intriguing, but completely implausible.

Google's CEO sees the Internet as an important tool in empowering voters by giving them unprecedented power to check up on politicians. Within five years, Schmidt believes, Google or someone else will come out with "truth predictor" software that would give voters insight into whether statements made by politicians were accurate by comparing their statements to historical data. "One of my messages [to UK Conservative Party members] is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, inputting 'is this true or false?'" said Schmidt.

Having wireless fact-checking hardware at a press conference buzzing loudly when a politician starts slinging mud or is cutting loose with the hyperbole sounds fantastic. It would definitely cause politicians to be more careful about what they say, but would it really make that much of a difference?

I'll make a prediction that this never comes to existence. The reasons are fairly obvious.
First, the MSM at this time is incredibly inept at fact checking and they have people and resources that are supposed to do that as their job.
The MSM also promulgates lies to the point that they become pseudo-truths. (If the press says it enough times it MUST be true.) The MSM presence on the web is large and considered to be legitimate even when wrong.
The Internet is jammed packed with opinion posturing as truth. So how is the creator of this lie detector going to parse what is true and what isn't? Who gets to oversee the choices and weighting of the sources?
Sources themselves are clearly partisan. Anyone that has ever read Civil War history realizes that. Or you can just go to HNN and read any article on Bush and you'll quickly see that historians aren't quite the protectors of truth that they would like you to believe they are.
Google and their ilk have more than a little warping in their political presence. Can they be trusted to be non-partisan in their "tool." I'll state forthrightly NO.
What happens when they get it wrong? Will Google and the like be held accountable? This strikes me as a lawyer's wet dream for defamation-of-character cases.

So what you end up with is a pseudo-truth partisan truth meter. It will be great for stirring up the really partisan voters, but will confuse and distort the truth for the rest.

Fortunately the article I linked is closer to my view than Schmidt's.

The larger issue is the degree to which the electorate really cares about facts. Sometimes the truth is unpleasant and makes us uncomfortable, and voters don't want to be reminded of it. Instead, they would rather hear half-truths, spin, and grand visions for how things could be one day if they just voted for Candidate X.

When the true Parliament of Whores is the entire electorate, "truth predictors" may not be much help to anyone.

But you have to admit that Schmidt probably did help his stock portfolio with that posture.