Credibility ratings platform NewsGuard launches locally
News credibility rating service, NewsGuard has today launched in Australia and New Zealand, and has reported that one in five news sites rated in Australia (19%) and New Zealand (18%) received ‘untrustworthy’ scores.
The result places Australia and New Zealand towards the middle of the pack, with a higher percentage of engagement with low-reliability sites than in the UK (15%) or Canada (4%), but lower than the US (46%), France (33%) or Germany (25%).
Backed by journalist-led data and misinformation research, NewsGuard looks to assist efforts in countering information warfare, with the ratings accessible to consumers and organisations who purchase a subscription to the platform.
“Since 2018, NewsGuard has protected internet users, brands, and democracies from the evolving threats of misinformation,” said Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard’s co-founder and co-CEO. “Now, our team has expanded to Australia and New Zealand to provide our journalistic credibility assessments of news sources to empower governments, brands, advertising agencies, and non-profit organizations with human-vetted insights to support quality journalism and systemically defund sources of harmful misinformation.”
The service was first launched in March 2018 by media entrepreneur and journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Crovitz, with the function of providing credibility ratings and detailed ‘nutrition labels’ for news and information websites, in the face of the misinformation crisis. The Australian rollout adds to the platform’s presence in the US, UK, Italy, France and Germany, where it rates all news and information websites that account for 95% of online engagement.
NewsGuard for Advertisers will allow advertisers and advertising agencies to license NewsGuard’s brand-safety tools to ensure that their programmatic advertising does not appear on misinformation websites. Due to the opaque nature of computer-placed digital advertising, NewsGuard and Comscore have estimated that there is US$2.6 billion a year in advertising unintentionally supporting misinformation sites.
NewsGuard has found that climate-related false narratives circulate widely in Australia and New Zealand, with 50% of the sites that regularly publish false content in Australia having published disinformation on climate change. Examples of popular narratives include “the rise in global sea levels is not accelerating,” “human activity does not contribute to climate change,” and “extreme weather is not getting worse”.
The work with Microsoft also extends to a library sponsorship through which NewsGuard is extending its global media literacy partnership program to public libraries in Australia and New Zealand, which will give patrons free access to NewsGuard’s browser extension.
“We welcome NewsGuard’s launch in Australia and New Zealand,” said Matt Masterson, Director of Information Integrity at Microsoft. “Microsoft firmly believes that empowering consumers with the tools necessary to find, consume and share authoritative information is critical to supporting healthy information ecosystems and, therefore, thriving democracies.”
NewsGuard is making public the results for The Conversation, 360info and ConspiracyDailyUpdate.com as examples.
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