NewsGuard, which is the establishment media’s latest effort to blacklist alternative media sites, is giving its sign of approval to proven hoaxes, even to stories that have been retracted. Microsoft is so desperate to spread fake news and blacklist ideas it doesn’t like, NewsGuard is automatically included in one of its browsers. You will find more examples below, but here is NewsGuard’s seal of approval (on the Google search page) for Rolling Stone’s 2014 hoax about a gang rape at the University of Virginia (UVA). Rolling Stone (which NewsGuard gave a passing grade) was eventually forced to retract the story and settle some lawsuits, but the far-left HuffPost’s aggregation of Rolling Stone’s proven lie is still live, and that green checkmark is NewsGuard’s way of telling readers they are reading something credible: You see, when you do a Google search of stories, NewsGuard and Microsoft use the green checkmark to tell you what is and is not credible, what is and is not blacklisted, and this is NewsGuard giving the green light to a story that was so fake, it had to be retracted. Compare that to NewsGuard’s labeling as fake news a basic news story like this one… Why is NewsGuard labeling that fake news? Simply because Breitbart News published it. We didn’t even write that story. The AP did. We are simply aggregating the AP… Look at the roundup below, which took less than 20 minutes to track down. Every single one of these stories is fake news, starting with BuzzFeed’s debunked lie about President Trump telling his then-personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress. Look at how NewsGuard and Microsoft openly and audaciously deceive their readers… The Washington Post’s debunked hoax about Russia hacking Vermont’s utility grid — credible! ! The lie about first lady Melania Trump being an illegal alien — credible! ! The lie about Trump changing the name of Black History Month — credible! ! The lie about Trump threatening to invade Mexico — credible! ! The lie about Congress investigating a Russian fund with ties to Trump — credible! ! So why? Why are NewsGuard and Microsoft deliberately marking fake news as credible? Why are they looking to fool people into believing proven hoaxes are legitimate stories — even outrageous ones about the first lady coming to the country illegally? This is all about 2020, my friends. As I pointed out last week, NewsGuard marks as fake every single story Breitbart News publishes — not because the story is inaccurate, but because we report stories NewsGuard does not believe should be reported. Nowhere in NewsGuard’s lengthy attack on us will you find a single example of a story Breitbart News got wrong. Nowhere can NewsGuard point to an example where our readers were misled. You can see for yourself. So we are not placed on NewsGuard’s blacklist for being inaccurate, for being deceptive, for not being careful. No, we are being blacklisted for uncovering and reporting things NewsGuard does not want uncovered and reported. Meanwhile, NewsGuard is literally marking fake news stories as credible. So what we have here is a fascist group of blacklisters looking to dupe as many people as possible into believing UVA has a rape problem, Melania Trump was an illegal alien, the Russians hacked into our electric grid, Trump told his attorney to lie, and so on… In a 50/50 country, NewsGuard and Microsoft are obviously hoping to tip the election by fooling enough people into believing up is down and black is white. There is no other explanation for Microsoft and NewsGuard deliberately marking proven fake news as “credible” and legitimate news as fake. “NewsGuard”? More like “Fake NewsGuard.” Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.<doc-sep>Graphic : Public Domain Pictures NewsGuard is a startup organization that aims to evaluate the reliability of news organizations and give web users a quick rating for how much they should trust what they’re reading. As of this week, the company’s plug-in now comes packaged in Microsoft’s mobile Edge browser. It’s a development that everyone should give their close attention. Advertisement The update to Edge came with little promotion from Microsoft. The addition of NewsGuard to the mobile browser was first flagged by the Guardian, which pointed out that Edge users now get a warning when visiting the website for the UK tabloid the Daily Mail. “Proceed with caution: this website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability,” the abbreviated warning reads. The use of fact checkers to rate news content on the web has become an increasingly popular option for platforms as inaccurate, misleading, and false news continues to plague the inter-webs and cause political trouble for companies that just want to focus on making money. Facebook’s attempts to rate news sites alongside shared links have generally been considered an utter failure, but NewsGuard thinks it can do better. When promoting its service, it has emphasized that it uses real human beings to perform the evaluations based on a transparent set of nine criteria. In August, it told Wired that it employs “nearly 40 reporters and dozens of freelancers” who are “working their way through 4,500 websites that they say account for 98 percent of the content shared online.” Using a desktop browser, you have to install the NewsGuard plug-in, but if you’re part of the small group of people who use the mobile Edge browser it should already be installed in the updated app. For now, it’s an opt-in feature that can be enabled by going to “Settings > News Rating” and toggling on the option for “Display rating on the address bar.” The rating doesn’t automatically pop-up; it simply shows a little shield icon in the browser bar that’s either green or red—green is good, red is bad. Clicking the icon drops down a short evaluation of the site’s trustworthiness and gives you the option to “See the full Nutritional label.” This longer evaluation is more detailed than Facebook’s comparable fact-checking program, giving short summaries on what the site covers, who owns it, its overall credibility, and other categories. For example, Gizmodo gets a green rating and the short description says, “This website generally maintains basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” Clicking the Gizmodo nutritional label brings up more information like this: Further on in the rating, we get dinged for cross-posting an article from our sister-site Splinter to our homepage that calls Donald Trump a serial liar. “Lying involves intentionally stating falsehoods, and that can usually not be proven.” We might push back on who you can or can’t call a liar, but there’s nothing egregious in the evaluation. Still, the idea of building in a fact-checking program at the browser level is troubling. NewsGuard has an incredibly well-connected team of leaders that includes people like the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Louis Gordon Crovitz. Its advisory board includes former CIA director Michael Hayden and George W. Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge. Earlier this month, MintNews did a long dive into the NewsGuard leadership’s uncomfortable ties to neocon think tanks as well as their own history of spreading false information. Crovitz, for example, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that falsely claims Xerox PARC labs deserves “full credit” for inventing the internet. This is an absurd claim designed to advance the argument that private business is where real innovation happens. It’s so absurd that Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, felt compelled to debunk this nonsense. Advertisement All of NewsGuard’s leaders and advisors bring the power to get shit done, as evidenced by this plug-in you’ve probably never heard of suddenly being present in Edge. An opt-in option is no big deal, but there’s no way to say for sure that it won’t become a default mode over time. And even if users simply see the green or red icon, NewsGuard can have an impact. A study by Gallup and the Knight Foundation surveyed 2,000 adults in the U.S., showing them articles with and without NewsGuard’s ratings. The study concluded readers were most likely to trust articles that included the green icon in the address bar. This intuitive perception of accuracy was being influenced by a very simple design tweak. And the possibility of this becoming part of every browser would make it an extremely powerful organization. Even if the company is currently the most open, transparent, and accurate fact checking source on the planet, that could all change down the line. We sent several questions to NewsGuard but did not receive an immediate reply and we’ll update this post when we do. (Please see the update at the bottom of this post for NewsGuard’s responses to our questions.) Above all, we want to know if there has been any discussion about turning NewsGuard on by default in Edge rather than making it opt-in. Advertisement We also want to know how the company’s business model works. NewsGuard’s website includes lots of explanation for why you should trust the service but it’s unclear how it intends to make a profit. Its leadership told Wired they hope “the tech companies that already dictate much of the world’s information diet will license their nutrition labels in some form.” I’m not totally sure what that means, but they also said they envision licensing the ratings list to advertisers to help them build a white list of sites that are safe to place ads. Again, that’s an enormous amount of power. It’s also unclear exactly what NewsGuard will do with the data it collects. Its privacy page goes to great lengths to assure users that no personally identifiable information is being automatically collected. But it also collects a litany of device information that could be valuable and it only stipulates that it does not share “even the anonymous information with any outside party for the purpose of advertising sales.” What about for non-advertising purposes? Advertisement Of course, there’s plenty of reason to believe that any worst-case scenario will never come to fruition. Imagine the shit storm Microsoft would face from conservatives when their phone starts popping up a message that claims CNN is a trustworthy site. Imagine the shit storm Microsoft would face from liberals when their phone starts popping up a message that claims Fox News is a trustworthy site. For all the good a simple warning or endorsement could do in helping people parse the news, many people just don’t want to hear the message. Update 5:30 PM: NewsGuard sent us the following responses: Gizmodo: Are there currently plans to add the plug-in to any other browsers? NewsGuard: We’re in discussions with all of the major tech and platform companies about ways to integrate NewsGuard into their search results, social media news feeds, and browsers. We expect to have more to announce soon. Advertisement Gizmodo: Have there been discussions about turning NewsGuard on by default rather than making it opt-in? NewsGuard: That’s up to the platforms and browser companies who partner with us to use our ratings. Advertisement Gizmodo: In your privacy policy, you state that you don’t collect personally identifiable information beyond a name and email address if a user provides voluntary feedback. You do say that you collect anonymized analytics data but you “do not share even the anonymous information with any outside party for the purpose of advertising sales.” Do you share that analytics data with outside parties for any purpose that is not advertising sales? NewsGuard: No. Gizmodo: Can you explain to us exactly how NewsGuard’s business model works? NewsGuard: We sell a license to use our ratings to tech companies—such as search engines, social media platforms, and browser companies—that want to display our ratings to their users on their platforms, such as in search results, news feeds, or as part of a browser. Advertisement<doc-sep>Microsoft has started warning users of its Edge mobile browser about untrustworthy news sites. The software giant has partnered with NewsGuard to provide warnings in its Edge browser for iOS and Android, and this functionality has been added this week as an optional setting. NewsGuard was founded by journalists Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, and rates sites based on a variety of criteria including their use of deceptive headlines, whether they repeatedly publish false content, and transparency regarding ownership and financing. Microsoft first started offering an optional NewsGuard browser extension for Edge on the desktop version of Windows 10 last year, but the move to build this directly into the mobile version suggests the company may be looking to make this a core part of Edge in the future. The Guardian reports that Edge mobile is now warning users that the Daily Mail’s website, Mail Online, “generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” Several companies are trying to tackle fake images and news Although Edge mobile isn’t widely used, Microsoft’s move is still significant. Experts have warned that we’re heading towards an “information apocalypse” involving AI-generated fakes and fake news. A significant lack of digital literacy can make people easily vulnerable to fake news and viral hoaxes, and as technology and AI get even smarter it’s going to be more difficult to spot a fake. Several companies are already trying to tackle fake imagery using browser plug-ins, and NewsGuard is trying to solve the fake news problem. One of the big hurdles is getting people to install an add-on like NewsGuard, and Microsoft has removed that barrier with Edge mobile by building it directly in. It’s unusual, as technology companies have struggled to take ownership of misinformation campaigns. NewsGuard is also stepping in to take responsibility for its ratings, and co-founder Steve Brill tells The Guardian that people can blame NewsGuard. “They can blame us. And we’re happy to be blamed,” says Brill. “Unlike the platforms we’re happy to be accountable.”<doc-sep>
As news outlets bombard social media feeds from all directions, a new app will help its users filter which news is legitimate and which is fake. The Microsoft Edge browser now automatically installs a third-party app called NewsGuard, which takes the guesswork out of the equation by using a green feature for "reliable" and red for "proceed with caution" for news outlets that a user visits. Here's how it works: If someone pulls up a story from the Russian news site RT, then a "proceed with caution" signal will appear. NewsGuard calls RT the site of "a leading Russian government propaganda effort." When someone swipes to a story from Britain's The Daily Mail, the app says that outlet has "been forced to pay damages in numerous high-profile cases." When an article from the New York Times is pulled up, the message from NewsGuard says, "exerts significant influence on national and international news and public debate." Microsoft says it isn't trying to censor any outlets or infringe on any company's right to free speech. "The objective is not to preclude access to any news content — an approach that would conflict with our nation's free speech principles — but rather to empower readers with additional information on the source and reliability of that content as they consume and/or share it," Tom Burt, Microsoft's corporate vice president for customer security and trust, wrote last summer. Until recently, anyone who previously wanted NewsGuard had to manually download and install it themselves. The app directs users to settings that allow them to easily set up their choices, with colors to guide them and give them a hint of what to expect. NewsGuard currently rates only U.S.-based news websites and major international sites. "We're delighted to be able to reach millions of people through Microsoft Edge for mobile, giving news consumers more information about the sources of news they see online based on basic journalistic criteria of credibility and transparency," Gordon Crovitz, a former Wall Street Journal publisher and one of NewsGuard's CEOs, wrote. NewsGuard employs seasoned journalists who scour companies and their articles, and it has advisors like former CIA director General Michael Hayden and The Information founder Jessica Lessin. There's a "nutritional label" next to each site's name, which gives a summary of the company from ownership to financing, content and credibility. Though "fake news" is a term recently brought to light by President Donald Trump, starting with his 2016 campaign and still going strong today, false news isn't new to the world or the United States. Since ancient and medieval times, yellow journalism and fake propaganda has led countries to war, it is speculated that it got the United States involved in the Spanish-American War. Now with the internet and so many news outlets — both fake and real — at the fingertips of hundreds of millions of people, and with digital media taking over, this is likely the first of many devices that can help news readers stay on top of what they decide to follow.