NewsGuard, a “news rating agency” which offers its app and browser extension to allegedly help people discern actual news from “fake news”, has proudly announced that, according to the results of a recent Gallup poll, the vast majority of US news consumers would “want social media sites and search engines to integrate NewsGuard ratings and reviews into their news feeds and search results”.
The poll also shows that the overwhelming majority of respondents trusts NewsGuard ratings because they are done by “trained journalists with varied backgrounds.”
From today's @Gallup study that surveyed a sample of 25,000 U.S. news consumers: "89% of users of social media sites… want social media sites and search engines to integrate NewsGuard ratings and reviews into their news feeds and search results." https://t.co/22wfAUqEZj
— NewsGuard (@NewsGuardRating) 9 января 2019 г.
A considerable number of social media users, however, did not appear eager to trust this assessment, accusing NewsGuard of censorship and criticising the way the poll was conducted.
It's literally censorship. No other word for it. Having successfully censored the #MSM this is an attempt to censor social media
— Paul Verity (@PaulieVerity) 10 января 2019 г.
No thanks, I would rather do my own research than be a sheep. I’m actually putting @NewsGuardRating in the same category as @snopes. you rate @CNN and @FoxNews as green when they have been caught out time and time again with #FakeNews. How do you justify that?
— #freeassange (@yogabuni) 10 января 2019 г.
So you paid them two dollars a vote? I don’t think that’s a poll is it?
— Dave Ravicher (@Whtapl) 10 января 2019 г.
The poll was neither statistically valid nor representative if respondents were not randomly sampled and were literally paid for their participation.
— D.C. (@DavisColby) 10 января 2019 г.
Why not mention that you commissioned and financed this poll? Why not disclose that you are a top investor in Newsguard? Why not mention that the poll itself states that those polled are "not representative" of U.S. adults?
— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) 11 января 2019 г.
NewsGuard employs what they describe as a “SWAT team” of analysts who monitor news, using a colour-coded system to rate them, with the ratings being automatically spread to all users of their app or browser extension.
The company was founded by veteran journalist Steven Brill and Louis Gordon Crovitz, former executive vice president of the Dow Jones. Its advisory board lists people including Tom Ridge, the first Secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, and Ret. General Michael Hayden,ex-chief of both NSA and CIA.
Wow, this is the advisory board for NewsGuard, the corporate media's favorite new "fact-checking," "anti-fake news" platform:
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) 10 января 2019 г.
— CIA/NSA director
— Homeland security secretary
— Undersecretary of state for public diplomacy
— White House communications directorhttps://t.co/PtLYohaeJ2 pic.twitter.com/bSGPUmEpWZ
According to MintPress News, NewsGuard is now "lobbying to have its rankings of news sites installed by default on computers in US public libraries, schools, and universities as well as on all smartphones and computers sold in the United States".
Also, the NewsGuard app was recently added by Miscrosoft "as a built-in feature of Microsoft Edge, its browser for iOS and Android mobile devices", leading NewsGuard to announce that they hope "that this new partnership will allow Microsoft to add NewsGuard to Edge on Windows 10 [operating system for computers] as well", MintPress News notes.
