Microsoft recently made a bold and commendable attack against fake news. Fake news from irreputable websites spread like wildfire across Facebook and Twitter. These fraudulent, hate speech-ridden, and biased websites turn up on the top of internet search results, if you’re searching for the “right” key phrases. Fake news got Trump elected. Interestingly, conservatives and the elderly are the most likely sharers of fake news, though the elderly could simply be more frequent news sharers on Facebook. These groups make up a large portion of Trump’s base. It’s no surprise then that a majority of the fake news shared on Facebook before the 2016 election favored Trump.
If democracy itself is to survive, we need a well-informed and information-hungry populace. We need people willing to seek out answers, not reaffirm bias. That’s why we need to become better at sorting our fake news, propaganda, and hate speech from legitimate news sources and opinions. If we don’t, we’ll be doomed to not only repeat history, but to bring about far more radicalized leaders. For the first time, social networks like Facebook and Twitter have had long discussions about whether or not they should ban the president of the United States for hate speech and inciting violence. This is not normal, and not the behavior of an official elected by a well-informed populace.
Microsoft is trying to do its part by warning users that they may have stumbled upon a less than reputable source of news. This is now a feature of Microsoft’s Mobile Edge browser, though it’s not currently turned on by default. It’s the result of a partnership with NewsGuard, a third party journalism monitor. But is Microsoft’s approach to fake news too heavy-handed, and can we trust this little-known company, NewsGuard?
In This Article:
Combating Fake News
Apple’s and Google’s Approaches
Apple and Google have taken similar approaches to combating the scourge of fake news. Both have News apps, creatively titled Apple News and Google News. These news apps take two different approaches. Apple’s is a long list of news from sources derived from your interest and Safari browsing history, as well as the history from some of your other apps that share this data with your Apple News app. This is localized and anonymized AI to filter what you might want to read from a list of reputable news sources. You can also choose to use your own, but Apple may downrank less reputable sources. Apple hasn’t been clear on how they manage fake news, but has stated it’s a priority.
Google, on the other hand, has set out to pop ideological bubbles. Their news app gauges your interests using search histories, browsing history, purchases, app downloads, location, routines, and more. From this, Google can figure out the news articles you will be most interested in reading. Then, they filter out disreputable sources. They’ll also identify news stories using machine learning, showing you the same story from different news websites. As such, you get a wider view into your news, but you get this at the cost of your privacy. Google requires your location history, credit cards, and more to formulate this data.
Microsoft’s Unique Approach
Microsoft also has a news app. You won’t guess it’s name. Oh! You did? Well look at you, smartypants. Yes, Microsoft’s news app is called Microsoft News. Microsoft doesn’t give much information about this app on their website. However, on their app page, they state that “Our editors curate the most trusted, important, interesting, and trending news.” The app is also highly customizable based on the interests you tell the app about. It’s a surprisingly popular app, with 4.4 stars in the App Store as of this writing.
However, they’ve taken their fight against fake news a step further: into your browser. Microsoft’s Edge mobile browser now has a built-in plugin, powered by NewsGuard. If the user turns it on, they’ll see NewsGuard’s news source ratings right in their browser. These will show a green badge next to a trustworthy source, gray or empty shields for unrated sources, and red for sources you should be cautious in trusting. NewsGuard doesn’t tell you not to read the source, just that you should exercise caution reading it and formulating your opinions based on that reporting. You’ll also see these warnings on the websites.
Microsoft clearly believes this will convince people to consider their news sources more seriously. That opinion is backed by research. NewsGuard’s study shows their badges can influence a reader’s trust in a news source instantly.
The Social Network Approach
Facebook and Twitter have also decided to finally take action on fake news. Though pundits warned the two companies that Russian agents were using their networks to spread propaganda, the two sites downplayed fake news, harassment, and hate speech on their platforms. Then 2016 taught them a valuable lesson. Since then, they’ve purged tens of thousands of fraudulent accounts from their sites.
Besides removing accounts for spreading fake news with the intention of deceiving others, they also play with their algorithmic feeds. Facebook will hide stories from accounts that frequently post fake news, as will Twitter. To detect this, social networks rely mostly on reporting. However, once a story has been flagged as false, Facebook and Twitter can find where it has been shared elsewhere on their network. This helps them stomp it out.
Facebook has also experimented with asking users who share from trustworthy sources to rate news sites they find on Facebook. They also have tried showing badges next to articles. However, while these features would be helpful, they can make people feel as though Facebook is “choosing a side” or that the company has an agenda. These people usually accuse Facebook of liberal bias, despite the fact that Facebook is using Poynter’s unbiased guidelines for fact checking and bias detection.
Third Parties
Finally, there are the third party tools like NewsGuard and Media Bias/Fact Check, as well as fact checking sites like Politifact or the Poynter Institute. These use a variety of methods to help people detect fake news. Usually, it’s just human curation. Someone, or a group of people, rate these sources and articles.
NewsGuard
NewsGuard powers Microsoft’s new bias checking features. It’s a for-profit company with human curation. Some, while comfortable with fact checking on websites, are not comfortable with NewsGuard. But what are they doing wrong?
How Do They Rate Sources?
NewsGuard has a small team of editors who go through a website’s articles. They have covered the most popular and most frequently shared websites on the internet. After installing their plugin on Firefox, I was surprised to see most of my search results had a green checkmark next to them now. NewsGuard was really doing their work to prepare for a deal as big as the one they now have with Microsoft.
But how do they make these rankings? Using the scoring above, the editors need to make their own decisions about a website. If a publisher is doing well, they’ll get a higher score in each category. It’s up to the individual reviewers to check for false news, see if the author or publisher released an update if news was false or fake, and ensure that they label ads and opinions or editorials appropriately. At a lower level, they ensure there is accountability at the publisher. While this helps prevent conflicts of interest, in the wake of gamergate and other online harassment scandals, many female journalists would fail the final point on their chart: providing information about content creators.
NewsGuard then adds up the individual scores. If the scores are between 60 and 100, the publisher gets a green checkmark. That’s a surprisingly low value for the minimum for passing. However, most troubling is the level of subjectivity in each score.
Who Are They?
Just as NewsGuard wants to know about the content creators, we have to look into those who run the company. That’s the first point to bring up: this is a for-profit company. They currently profit from brands wishing to avoid advertising on fake news websites. However, there are other financial opportunities open for NewsGuard in the future, including payment from publishers for counseling on how to improve their reliability.
But who are the folks at the top?
Worrying Connections
Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz are the “Co-CEOs” of NewsGuard. Brill comes from TIME Magazine and The New Yorker, two left leaning publications. Beyond a potential for some left-central bias, Brill doesn’t look too problematic on paper. He points to his more conservative Co-CEO, Crovitz, for balance, saying Crovitz’s conservatism balances out his liberalism.
But Gordon Crovitz is more problematic. Not because he’s conservative, there’s certainly balance and logic to be found on both sides of the isle. No, the problem comes from his business ties. He’s been involved with the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation, two neoconservative and pro-Iraq war think tanks. The latter, the Heritage Foundation, is also famously anti-LGBTQ. It frequently shares “opinion” pieces, falsely conflating LGBTQ rights as the opposing viewpoint of religious rights. It has shared articles advocating in favor of legalizing discrimination against same-sex couples, transgender people, and sexually active unwed women. Keep this anti-LGBTQ bias in mind for later. Corvitz himself has allied himself with propagandists.
Other Advisors
Then there are other staff and advisors. There’s Tom Ridge, the former Secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush. He’s an establishment conservative, who advised Bush to enter the war in Iraq based on sketchy and later proven false information.
There’s retired General Michael Hayden, former Director of the CIA and NSA, as well as the former Principle Deputy Director of National Intelligence. Why would spy organization connections matter? Because NewsGuard is a plugin that analyzes webpage content and information. NewsGuard claims they do not collect this information, but they’re one sentence in a privacy policy away from being able to do it.
However, once again, to balance out conservatives, there’s Richard Stengel and Don Baer. Baer was a former White House communications director and advisor to Bill Clinton. He’s the current chairman of PBS and a PR firm, Burson Cohn & Wolfe. There’s also Richard Stengel, who served under Obama. However, Richard Stengel once spoke out in favor of propaganda. A man who believes that lying to a government’s people—now in charge of telling people what to believe—is not a man we can trust.
Many of these people have problematic pasts and possible biases that do not cancel each other out. They’ve painted a very clear pro-establishment picture here. Still, this is only a small sampling of the people at NewsGuard. There are many more people working on reviewing these articles who likely have journalistic integrity at the forefront of their minds. We shouldn’t assume that the entire organization is tainted due to some clear pro-establishment views and an assumption that they could be in this business only for profit and political control, not journalistic integrity. However, if there’s doubt, we need to examine it. Blind trust is what got us in this situation to begin with.
Trustworthy?
One of these things is not like the other.
Taking into account what we know about the people behind NewsGuard, can we trust them? Let’s take a look at their work. I don’t think it would be fair to only take in their political beliefs and financial ties. However, we should be cautious and look for signs of strong establishment beliefs, war mongering, and anti-LGBTQ bias.
Many of the sources in the image above with all 9 checkmarks are, without a doubt, good sources. But some are not. For example, we can see above that Fox News received a green checkmark. Fox News is frequently caught in reporting false or misleading news. They do not post corrections, and will run with a false story for days. They’ve aligned themselves as the propaganda wing of Trump’s party, a sort of circular relationship where they simultaneously get their viewpoints from Trump, but also influence Trump through their programming and reinforcement. Fox News is most certainly not a source that one should trust.
Fake News!
There are some very obviously failing publishers. Breitbart, RT, and InfoWars, for example, all fail NewsGuard’s checks. They’re either directly connected to propaganda in Russia (RT), or engage in frequent false content and highly biased material disguised as fact.
NewsGuard Approves Hate and Fake News
But then there are other sites that receive green checkmarks from NewsWire, despite being extremely biased. For example, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire received a green checkmark. This brings up one of my biggest complaints about NewsGuard. They do not discredit a site for hate speech. At least not hate speech against LGBTQ people, it would seem.
The Daily Wire frequently fails fake news checks. It has a mixed factual rating from Media Bias/Fact Check, which also points out its extreme conservative bias. But perhaps worst of all, the site spreads hate speech about transgender people. Ben Shapiro is famous for his refusal to call transgender women by female pronouns and insistence that being transgender is a mental disorder (despite logic and doctors saying otherwise). Even Twitter recognizes this as hate speech. Yet NewsGuard, with its connections to the anti-LGBTQ Heritage Foundation, does not demote The Daily Wire based on this alone.
The Daily Kos, rightfully, gets a red exclamation mark from News Guard. It is not a trustworthy source of news. However, it’s no worse than Breitbart, The Daily Caller, or The Daily Wire. It’s on the other end of the spectrum, and has anti-establishment views, which put it further at odds with NewsGuard’s leadership.
Hate Speech Gets Their Checkmark
The Daily Wire is hateful of Muslims, LGBTQ people, and Mexican asylum seekers. It’s not just bias, it’s hate.
Let’s face it, the men who founded this are straight, white men. It would be incredibly irresponsible to claim that all straight white men do not empathize with the hate speech women, LGBTQ people, and people of color receive online. However, the fact that spreading hate speech is seen as a legitimately held opinion by NewsGuard is indicative of a larger diversity issue. There are not enough people having their voices heard at NewsGuard to warn people about hate speech. NewsGuard should have 10 categories they rank sites on, with one of them being whether or not the site spreads hate speech.
Hate speech is easy to recognize and define. It’s perhaps less subjective than their other ratings. Does this speech mean to demean, devalue, or attack a person for their religion, gender, identity, sexual orientation, or race? Does it inspire violence against these targeted groups? Then it is clearly hate speech.
Not Big Enough
NewsGuard has managed to rate a great deal of the most popular websites on the internet, but what about smaller sites? You’ll notice that Leaf and Core is unrated. Let’s face it, this is a small blog ran by one software engineer in her spare time. Sure, I always link my sources. I back up all statements with sources. However, I do mix opinion in with those statements. I’ve written “just the facts” pieces before, but I prefer the personal touch. I have a lot of experience in software and the tech industry, and, well, I believe, I have valuable input on each story. I’ll leave that up to you.
Still, my site will likely never get a review, simply because it is small. Leaf and Core links are not spread across the web. NewsGuard is not a large organization either. They’re for profit, do not have volunteers, and are limited by their own resources. They can only review so many sites, so they focus on the larger ones.
However, this reinforces an establishment bias. This cuts out small, independent news sources. It cuts out hobbyist journalists, insider information, and other small news publishers that the internet help popularize. As long as these sources do fact checking, share sources to larger sites, and make it clear that they’re injecting opinion into the news, then they are, without a doubt, trustworthy sources. The individual can have integrity without profitability. NewsGuard will inevitably hurt small journalists like me. However, I cannot deny that it could push both small journalists and larger organizations to better fact checking as a result, and that, with the current epidemic of fake news, is more valuable.
Right Idea, Wrong Implementation?
NewsGuard, I think, has the right idea. But they fail when it comes to the implementation. First, the site should not be for profit. Wikipedia manages to maintain a gigantic database of factual information despite non-profit status. Volunteers, scholars, and enthusiasts keep the information accurate and factual. A Wiki fact checker would allow more reach, could use its diversity of thought to take a harder stance against hate speech, and could remove itself from bias thanks to a large number of contributors who do not care about personal profit or power.
Unfortunately, we cannot rely on news literacy. We once believed we could rely on basic scientific literacy, but we now have illnesses returning thanks to the anti-vax movement, anti-GMO beliefs slowing farming progress and hunger initiatives, and climate change deniers driving our planet further into oblivion. If there is one fallacy we must absolutely avoid, it’s the belief that common sense is common. What is clear to one will not be clear to another.
Note that some sources, like The Daily Wire and The Daily Caller, far more extreme than the Daily Mail, received green checkboxes from NewsGuard.
Therefore, we need tools like NewsGuard. I personally recommend Media Bias/Fact Check over it. The site has been verified by NewsGuard, interestingly enough. You can also use this tool specifically to fact check the president’s tweets.
I won’t say you shouldn’t install NewsGuard. It can be a good resource. It’s small, lacks diversity, and is too forgiving of hate speech, but it does do some fact checking, and can keep you away from the most dangerous websites. Just remember that it seems to have some right-center bias, like Forbes or The Wall Street Journal. Remember that it seems to accept hate speech, and be critical of this. Know where your fact checks are coming from and use multiple sources. I recommend installing multiple browser plugins to test for this, if you’re more worried about validity of sources than you are about potential privacy violations.
However, I realize that I’m, once again, asking for news literacy, or, rather, news rating literacy.
How Do We Proceed?
I frequently need to verify the validity of sources for stories. I’ve been using the Media Bias/Fact Check plugin for Firefox (also Chrome). Also, you may have noticed I often use multiple sources. I do this to help weed out bias, but also to provide alternative views to my own. I’ll often add a “Further Reading” label to sources when I believe that someone else’s viewpoint is valuable to the discussion, even if it is not my own.
But these are examples of news literacy that I’ve learned from writing news. That’s more than anyone should be expected to do. News literacy won’t save us, we need tools like NewsGuard, like Media Bias/Fact Check. What we need is Wikimedia to get in the fact checking game, with browser plugins and extensions. We need Politifact, Snopes, the Washington Post, Poynter, and other fact checking organizations to start rating media sources like this. We need browser extensions. Wikimedia looked like it was getting more involved, but we haven’t heard anything new about their projects recently.
We can only hope some of the most reliable fact checkers get into software development. Simple browser extensions that check their database of fact checks would be enough to push news literacy to new levels. We definitely need more tools like NewsGuard, but NewsGuard is definitely not the most trustworthy source. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the best plugins we have right now.
Microsoft is on the right track by trying to put fact checking right next to articles. Hopefully others, with more reputable decision making skills, follow suit. A healthy democracy cannot exist alongside of an epidemic of fake news. We need these tools now, more than ever.
Sources, annotated with emoji representing NewsGuard’s ratings. Which do you trust? What about this article, with it’s empty, unrated shield icon? Do you trust it?
- Daniel Funke, Poynter Institute ✅
- Taylor Hatmaker, TechCrunch ✅
- Rhett Jones, Gizmodo ✅
- Jared Keller, Pacific Standard ✅
- Issie Lapowsky, Wired ✅
- NewsGuard, [2] ⬜️
- Whill Oremus, Slate ✅
- Saqib Shah, Engadget ✅
- Tom Warren, The Verge ✅
- Jim Waterson, The Guardian ✅
- Whitney Webb, MindPress News ⬜️