As legislators and the public have bludgeoned them with complaints about how they’ve let fake news melt democracy, tech big boys such as Microsoft and Facebook have said hey, that ain’t our thing – we’ll get fact-checkers to take this slapping for us.
Bring it on, said one of those fact-checking services. The buck stops right here, said third-party startup NewsGuard… following it having glued an “untrustworthy” badge onto the Daily Mail’s journalism, which includes the Mail on Sunday and Mail Online.
As part of Microsoft’s attempt to stop the spread of malarkey, the company has preinstalled NewsGuard’s messages into its Microsoft Edge browser on Android and iOS. Thus, as of this week, Edge users are seeing messages saying that Mail Online rates a one out of five for credibility: “the same level as the Kremlin-backed RT news service,” as The Guardian reports.
Note: not all Edge users will see the ratings. Users will need to turn on the option in their app settings to see how fake-newsy or not-fake-newsy a site is.
The Daily Mail is a UK tabloid that’s second only to The Sun for daily newspaper readership. It, along with its online outlets, have been rated by NewsGuard as “generally fail[ing] to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.”
According to The Guardian (which, according to PC Mag, NewsGuard has rated as trustworthy), Microsoft Edge users who visit Mail Online will now see a small shield icon in the URL bar at the top of the screen. It asserts that the website…
…generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability… [and] has been forced to pay damages in numerous high-profile cases.
Readers should tread with caution, NewsGuard says, given that…
…the site regularly publishes content that has damaged reputations, caused widespread alarm, or constituted harassment or invasion of privacy.
NewsGuard is also warning that the Daily Mail sites fail to “handle the difference between news and opinion responsibly” and fail to reveal “who’s in charge, including any possible conflicts of interest.”
The NewsGuard app is run by a group of veteran journalists, including co-CEOs Steven Brill – who founded The American Lawyer, Court TV, and the Yale Journalism Initiative – and Gordon Crovitz, who was a publisher of, and a columnist writing for, the Wall Street Journal.
It eschews algorithms, instead relying on a team of trained journalists and editors to review and rate websites based on journalistic criteria such as whether a site regularly publishes false content, reveals conflicts of interest, discloses financing, or publicly corrects reporting errors.
When a site fails to meet any of its nine criteria, NewsGuard emails and calls, to try to give it a chance to comment.
That’s what NewsGuard says it did with the Daily Mail. NewsGuard’s label states “fairly clearly” how many times it tried to contact Mail Online, Brill told the Guardian. However, that conversation was not to be, Brill said:
The analyst that wrote this writeup got someone on the phone who, as soon [as] he heard who she was and where she was calling from, hung up. We would love to hear if they have a complaint or if they change anything.
Don’t blame Microsoft for the rating, he said. This one’s on us, and we’re happy to answer for it:
They can blame us. And we’re happy to be blamed. Unlike the platforms, we’re happy to be accountable.
We want people to game our system. We are totally transparent. We are not an algorithm.
“The buck stops here” is NewsGuard’s business model: it’s licensed to tech companies that want to fight fake news but don’t want to be the ones responsible for separating the wheat from the chaff.
It’s already completed these “human-generated verdicts” on the top 2,000 news outlets in the US, Brill said, and is staffing up to do the same with the top 150 news sites in the UK. The plan is to publish those results in April.
A Mail Online spokesperson told the Guardian that they’re now talking to NewsGuard to rectify this “egregiously erroneous classification”:
We have only very recently become aware of the NewsGuard startup and are in discussions with them to have this egregiously erroneous classification resolved as soon as possible.
roleary
There goes ALL of the British press then.
No big loss. The Scotsman just ran a Brexit story with a headline that was contradicted by the first paragraph.
Scott
So I bet CNN, The New York Times, and Fox News all make the safe list. Truthfully none of our media sources in the US are unbiased. The left wing media (CNN, NYT, etc) salivated at everything Obama put out there and look for every chance to try and wreck the current president and anyone that agrees with him. Fox news did a lot of negative stuff about Obama, but tends to swoon over Trump. As far as I’m concerned none of them are trustworthy.
James
NewsGuard is all well and good but who is checking the checkers? This is in no way a defence of the Mail but with the ever increasing politicising of news, we are in an age where is almost impossible to to find an unbiased source. What ever happened to proper journalism and just the reporting of facts? You only have to look at the recent mainstream media coverage of the Covington Catholic High School kids to see the problems.
IT Guy
Guilty until proven innocent????
Jeff
How does this help massively exactly?
Most people who navigate to the Mail Online page through Facebook on Android are going to get a WebView page that doesn’t use the browser app directly. They won’t see the warning even if they have Edge installed.
The people running IOS are more likely to be running the default browser of Safari moreso if they’re the target demographic of the fake articles (Older people or the internet illiterate). It won’t help in that case either.
Jeff
I wonder also about the potential for payoffs and the “news” companies throwing their weight around in order to change or “influence” a rating.
Hopefully NewsGuard is transparent about attempts of bribery and threats of court action.
Bob Pratt
Censorship, plain and simple, by people who probably have their own agenda. As an adult I’m capable of sorting the wheat from the chaff without someone else’s help, foisted on me without invitation. The fact that they clear the Guardian is a joke, it’s been peddling the Liberal message for years.
Mahhn
Bob, you say “I’m capable of sorting the wheat from the chaff ” and I don’t doubt you. However most people can’t (to much of the same lies being fed from multiple sources, which are usually only one – a bad one) or worse Won’t, because well, it’s just easier to live in the fictional world of – it’s going to be okay, it’s getting better.
Meanwhile, people that know better – its 2 min to 12.
And really your example is a great one – since they sell bread that is Whole Wheat – meaning all the chaff is in there. Its not good for anyone, even cavemen didn’t eat the chaff. But man when they market it with pretty skinny girls, everybody buys it.
roleary
I wonder if they accept user submissions? It shouldn’t be hard to send them a few dozen easily debunked Guardian articles.
Tony Gore
There used to be a service that rated the coverage of health articles in the press and how accurate it was run by a doctor. It showed the press coverage and then related it to the original published research, and then how reasonable it was to draw the press conclusions from the research.
The Mail is a good case in point. I have a relation who believes everything read in the Daily Mail despite working somewhere that got a judgement against the Mail for inaccurate (to put it mildly) journalism.
Best quote I heard was from my brother – “if I want to know what my mother in law is thinking, I look in the Telegraph and for my mother, I look in the Daily Mail”.
This service is long overdue, and I look forward to it reaching the desktop too.
Mark Stockley
Seems like a great example of functionality that should be in a plugin rather than the core browser.
Sue Waterman
And approving the left wing Guardian whilst putting down the populist Mail has of course nothing to do with the politics of the “expert checkers”..
Anonymous
I’m not disagreeing with the point you have made but it’s interesting that you say “populist” Mail and not right wing Mail, or as I prefer, the Daily Tory :/ If the Guardian is left wing then the Daily Mail is most definitely right wing
David Bradbury
No surprise there. If you Google / Bing Daily Hate, the first result is the Daily Mail.
Wil
thank you for telling me what I can and cannot look at! appreciate it.
Wil
wouldnt it be more prudent to, maybe, flag news sites that are based solely off of opinion and not fact? I think one of the bigger problems (and this includes ALL MSM) is that op’ed’s have replaced journalism and news reporting. I am more than good to form my own opinions, they can all stop reporting their opinions as fact.
John
Wil, your comment is absolutely right on. The following question, however, still remains unanswered: “Is there such a news site? ANYWHERE?” Or the other question: “Does journalism still exist?”
Mick
This is the only truth Microsoft has every told.