Amidst COVID-19 breakout, fighting the spread of misinformation is as important as fighting the disease. Doing that in the best possible way is NewsGuard, an unbiased news rating system that is flagging baseless content regarding COVID-19. NewsGuard announces waving off its commercial subscription plan until July 1st, as its contribution to fighting misinformation.
A Credibility Checker
Starting today, NewsGuard will serve free in all modes its available in, thus alerting readers about the sites publishing misinformation about Coronavirus. NewsGuard does a nine criteria checklist before giving a badge to any site. The result of that will be either Green (indicating site is credible enough to be trusted), Red (untrusted), Yellow (a Satire basically, which is also unreal). Besides these, there’s a Grey badge indicating the content isn’t reliable. The last three are variable by slight differences but worth noticing the difference.
You’d see the badge beside a site’s URL in the search engine results or social media feeds like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. While Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers can have this as an extension, there’s a desktop client and Android/iOS apps available too. For users on Bing, it’s available by default, but users need to enable it in settings manually.
Here’s how it works
After adding this platform as an extension or by an app, it automatically checks the credibility of news stories shown in Google search results. They’ll be given a badge beside their link, thus assuring users about its trustworthiness. Further, clicking on it and going inside the story will show more information when clicked on the badge. A credibility score, transparency metrics, and a full list of how healthy it is.
The Nutrition Label of every relevant site details the complete background check of it, showing the ownership, financing, credibility, history, etc. This service is actually a paid plan for $2.99/month, but it’s announced to be serving free until July 1st, 2020, for fighting misinformation about Coronavirus. Here you can it for free: NewsGuard
