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.”
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.
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.
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.