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.
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.
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.
