Just Trust Us
In the era of fake news, a cottage industry of startups is competing to turn media credibility into a booming business. Do we really want that?
BY WILL OREMUS
In August, an analyst for a little-known U.S. startup called NewsGuard tried to contact the editors of the Daily Mail Online, the U.K.-based news and celebrity gossip site that ranks as one of the internet’s most-read publishers. NewsGuard staff called twice and emailed twice, asking questions about the Mail’s policies on deceptive headlines, source linking, and editorial transparency. It got no response.
This week, that silence came back to bite the Mail Online. The headline in the Guardian, a left-leaning rival to the populist Mail, seemed to carry a note of glee: “Don’t Trust Daily Mail Website, Microsoft Browser Warns Users.”
NewsGuard, it turns out, had spent the previous eight months developing “reliability ratings” for major online news outlets, and earlier this month it struck a deal with Microsoft to incorporate those ratings into the tech giant’s Edge browser as an optional setting. That’s when the Guardian noticed that the Mail Online had been tagged by NewsGuard with a “red” label, a reliability score of 3 out of 9, and the following warning: “Proceed with caution: This website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” For Microsoft Edge users with the “News Ratings” feature turned on, that warning appeared alongside every link to the Mail Online—whether in Google search results, Facebook or Twitter feeds, or the Mail’s own homepage.
The Mail cried foul. “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,” a spokesman said. The two companies are now in talks, both confirmed, with the Mail pleading its case for a better review. For now, NewsGuard is standing by its ratings. If the Mail wants a better one, it will have to improve some of its standards, said Steven Brill, the prominent U.S. media entrepreneur who is NewsGuard’s co-founder and co-CEO.
How did Brill’s company become online journalism’s latest referee? And what does it mean if NewsGuard, or another fledgling credibility-rating project, begins to wield outsize influence over which news organizations garner the most trust on the internet? This would be a dramatic change and maybe a welcome one. For much of this decade, the news business has seen its fortunes rise and fall at the whim of algorithms, such as the one that ranks stories in Facebook’s news feed. Those algorithms tended to emphasize the catchiness of a given headline over the reputation of the publisher, which helped to fuel fake news and shrill sensationalism. But the Mail’s run-in with NewsGuard may presage a new phase: one in which the big tech platforms’ algorithms begin to incorporate measures of a news outlet’s trustworthiness while a handful of startups and nonprofits vie to be the arbiters behind those ratings.
The trust industry is quietly taking shape. Should we trust it?
Of all of Facebook’s crimes against the news, the most serious may be this: Its news feed radically changed the basis upon which people decide what stories to read. In the pre-Facebook world, people picked a news outlet first (by buying a print edition or visiting a homepage) and then browsed the headlines on offer. As Facebook gradually became the default news source for hundreds of millions of readers, that order reversed: People scanned headlines from their news feed first and clicked accordingly, generally without regard to the source.
he shift sent shockwaves around the media world. Rage-inducing, polarizing, or otherwise tantalizing headlines became the primary factor in setting the news agenda, and opportunists learned to game Facebook’s algorithm with clickbait and propaganda. Old-school news outlets that penned straightforward, factual headlines saw their traffic dry up, while unverified content from unscrupulous startups, scammers, and even foreign agents rose to the top of people’s reading lists.
That’s an oversimplification, of course. Google News, and the internet more broadly, had a similar influence before Facebook came along. Reddit, Twitter, and other sites continued to have this effect after the Facebook news feed became everyone’s front page. And the effects weren’t all negative—the “gatekeepers” of the mainstream media had serious blind spots that social media helped to both expose and fill. (Think of the attention that Twitter funneled to the Ferguson protests, which were initially underreported by the mostly white, coastal legacy media.) But the upshot was the decimation of careful newsgathering operations and an erosion of the distinction between real and fake news.
