Microsoft Fights Fake News With NewsGuard Integration in Its Mobile Edge Browser (pcworld.com)

In a bid to fight fake news read while on your phone, Microsoft's mobile Edge browser on Android and iOS now includes the NewsGuard extension. From a report: The addition needs to be toggled on within the Edge settings menu to be enabled. Once it is, Edge will display a small shield icon next to the site's URL in the search bar: a green shield with a checkmark for a trusted news site, and a red shield with an exclamation point inside of it for a site that NewsGuard believes isn't always accurate. (Some sites haven't been evaluated, and these will simply show a gray shield.)

Comments

First hilarious casualty

[cyber-vandal]

The UK Daily Mail, a well-known source of ill-informed and reactionary garbage.

Re:First hilarious casualty

[mjwx]

The UK Daily Mail, a well-known source of ill-informed and reactionary garbage.

So for once, MS has made something that works. Jokes aside, NewsGuard isn't from MicroSoft, they've just included it by default in Edge. NewsGuard is an independent organisation founded by a pair of American lawyers and media entrepreneurs in 2018 that has criteria for judging the trustworthiness of news sites. The 1 star reviews for Chrome involve the words "Leftists" and "Neo Liberal" so that's a good sign the extension is pretty accurate.

From NewsGuard's site: Why Should You Trust Us?

[PhrostyMcByte]

Why Should You Trust Us?

Because we are trained journalists who have spent our careers dedicated to the profession. We care deeply about reliable journalismâ(TM)s pivotal role in democracy. (In case youâ(TM)re wondering, our experienced journalists come from diverse backgrounds and have no political axes to grind.)

Because you can see the credentials and backgrounds of everyone responsible for every NewsGuard reliability rating and Nutrition Label that you read. For the names and biographies of our staff and contributors, click here.

Because we have an ethics and conflicts of interest policy to which all of our analysts and editors have to agree. You can read that policy here.

Because we are totally transparent about how we make all of our decisions. Our Nutrition Label write-ups explain what is behind our decisions. We disclose and explain in detail the nine criteria we use to rate each news site on its journalistic practices. Weâ(TM)re not a black box algorithm.

Because we make concerted attempts to get comment from every websiteâ(TM)s editor or manager before we write anything negative about the site, and always include the comment in our Nutrition Labels (or make changes after weighing the comment and realizing our initial conclusion was wrong). Algorithms donâ(TM)t call for comment.

Because we will post any complaints from website proprietors about anything we have written about them. And we will answer them publicly â" and when warranted will make corrections, publicly, after we consider the complaint. You can read our policy for correcting errors or mistakes here.

Because we accept no fees from the news websites we rate. (Our revenue comes from the platforms and search engines for licensing our ratings in order to include them in their feeds and search results.) We rate all news and information sites among the approximately 4,500 sites responsible for 98% of the online engagement in English in the United States.

Because we do not collect any personal information of any kind from those who download and use our browser plug-ins. None. You can read our privacy policy here.

Because bringing more information to people about the news sources they encounter online is our only business. Our success depends entirely on being trustworthy and reliable.

Re:From NewsGuard's site: Why Should You Trust Us?

[slinches]

My policy is to never trust someone who is making a point of trying to convince me they are trustworthy.

Trustworthiness should be evident in your actions and no amount of assurances will be enough if that isn't true.

Re:From NewsGuard's site: Why Should You Trust Us?

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds convincing, but I don't trust you.

Self-defeating inverse relationship

[GameboyRMH]

The problem with this NewsGuard extension is that the more likely someone is to need it, the less likely they are to want it (and the more likely they are to actively dislike the idea of it).

Don't get your hopes up, lefties

[MikeRT]

Because it's backed by the neocons. You remember them, right? The folks whose handling of intelligence over Iraq made Obama's handling of the DIA report on ISIS look like a highly cordial disagreement between respectful parties? If they say that Hitler is a bad guy, you better get independent sources.

So what is Fake News?

[GregMmm]

Who determines what is "fake news"?

This should scare people. Don't they realize we are ASKING businesses/governments to make judgement calls of what is fake news? Translation: People are asking these entities to censor what they feel is fake news.

This seems like a dangerous idea to me. Heavens know a business will not call something it doesn't like to be fake news. Nor would a government who doesn't agree with certain ideas would call something fake news.

Re:So what is Fake News?

[RightwingNutjob]

Monoculture. Spend enough of the formative years of your life (ie most of your twenties) around loud people who think "there are two genders" is both fake news and a neo-Nazi dogwhistle and of course you'll start believing that 2+2=whatever the powers that be say it is. I'm not surprised. I'm saddened that the country I love has allowed itself to get so complacent that it has descended to this level of madness, but I'm not surprised. All this shoddy thinking is hardwired into the human mind. America just had the good luck to have not excited to that particular eigenstate for the first several hundred years of its history. One hopes we can damp it out before we turn into Venezuela.

Yeah, sure

[RightwingNutjob]

BuzzFeedNews rated as trustworthy. Nope.

I guess Microsoft is competing with Google in the Wokelympics.

Thanks, but no thanks

[reboot246]

I'm a grownup human being. I don't need a company (that has its own bias and agenda) telling me which news sources to trust and which to distrust.

I knew right away Microsoft's opinion was worthless when I followed the link in the summary and saw Breitbart flagged. Yes, Breitbart has a right-leaning bias, but it's like an antidote to the main stream media's false and biased reporting.

You all probably don't see it because of your hatred for everything Trump, but in my nearly 66 years I've never seen so much hatred for a president from the press, a press that's SUPPOSED to be unbiased.

Just a few years ago Trump was getting awards from the NAACP, but now he's racist? Don't be so stupid to believe shit like that. Show some independence and intelligence, for Pete's sake. I see you and I see sheep.

Re:Thanks, but no thanks

[Bobrick]

Breitbart an antidote to the mainstream... tell us more about being a "grown up human being", please.

Re:Thanks, but no thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

And in your 66 years you've learned zero about how to validate sources. Did you even bother to go and see what sort of affiliations the people making that assessment have? I'll give you a hint - it's not all from the left. Now I know that's an impossibility for you but for the rest of us we can see that when a pool of people from a broad political spectrum all agree that a site is untrustworthy, we're pretty comfortable with it.

You continue to wear your blinders. It makes your world that much more comfortable in your waning years, I'm sure.

Re:Thanks, but no thanks

[ljw1004]

Yes, Breitbart has a right-leaning bias, but it's like an antidote to the main stream media's false and biased reporting.

An "antidote" is a medicine you give to counteract a poison.

What you describe is countering one poison (what you call MSM's biased reporting) with another (what you call Breitbart's bias). That's not an antidote. I don't think there's any case of using one poison to cure another poison, other than homeopathy. In the absence of antidotes, I think the only thing we have us dilution -- i.e. counter biased reporting by clinging to news sources that are as unbiased as you can find.

Re:Thanks, but no thanks

[AmiMoJo]

Wow, Brietbart shills have a lot of mod points today.

And of course the anontrolls are out

[RightwingNutjob]

to both talk shit about right-leaning news outlets and by their presence to make us believe we need some white knight (like NewsGuard!) to ride to the rescue.

Re:Shouldn't news reporting be better?

[DCFusor]

Dunno what ass is modding you back down after I mod you up.

Where will The Onion fit in?

[mysidia]

They aren't real news, and they aren't fake news....
they're satirical news for purposes of humor, with such absurd topics that any literate person should immediately recognize the article content as satire past the first paragraph or so, even if they were living under a rock and didn't know what TheOnion was. Are they going to get the dreaded "Fake News Warning" anyways?

Re:Where will The Onion fit in?

[sad_]

from the newsguard site;

"orange rated sites indicate satire sites"

The news that got approved

[AHuxley]

by NGOs, NATO, think tanks, former US gov workers, former US go mil.
With an OS level GUI direct over your browser on your smart phone.

They seem shady

[asdfman2000]

For a tool that claims they care about transparency they really do their best to prevent you from looking up a list of sites and their ratings.

If anyone is interested, I dug into the code for the chrome extension and grabbed their API URL so you can look up sites without having to install their extension:

- Trusted: CNN
- Trusted: Daily Caller
- Trusted: The Independent
- Trusted: Mother Jones (lol)
- Trusted: Huffington Post (lol)
- Trusted: The Daily Beast (lol)
- Trusted: BuzzFeed News (ok this is just sad)
- Not Trusted: Breitbart
- Not Trusted: Daily Mail

Looks fair and balanced to me.

Re:They seem shady

[Ashe Tyrael]

On the other hand, they aren't wrong in some cases:

From the Daily Mail results: "The site repeatedly publishes false information and has been forced to pay damages in numerous high-profile cases."

Yup.

Re:They seem shady

[asdfman2000]

My list was by no means supposed to be exhaustive. My intention was to give everyone else access to the API so they can form their own opinions. I suppose I could write up a script to generate a google sheet from every news source on google news / slashdot / reddit, or something, but I'm far too lazy.

If it makes you feel any better, I'll drop the dailyKos one here.

- Not Trusted: Daily Kos

Re:Better yet, a small tweak

[Mashiki]

It's not liberals or conservatives you have to worry about. It's the progressives, who just like the communists of yesteryear are lining up to redefine words and make sure you're guilty of a hate crime.