Give Readers the Power of Transparency
Steven Brill, Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer, NewsGuard Technologies, Inc.
The great innovations of Silicon Valley were initially celebrated as forces only for good; more people could access more information more easily than ever before. But, as it is now clear, these miracles of technology have a dark side: the easy spread of false information, misinformation and disinformation.
Democracies can only function if their citizens have the information they need to participate in civic affairs. Purveyors of false information know this, which is why they target the citizens of the world’s democracies. False information can spread quickly, crowding out reliable information, if citizens have no help in determining which is which.
Governments, international organisations and private companies are now working to counter the problem. The European Union Code of Practice on Disinformation, signed in September, 2018, calls on digital platforms to facilitate ‘the assessment of content through indicators of the trustworthiness of content sources’. Journalists can play a critical role in solving this problem of journalism. At NewsGuard, journalists arm readers with unbiased information about the reliability of those feeding them the news. NewsGuard, which launched first in the US in August and intends to launch in Europe in 2019, is creating ‘Nutrition Labels’ write-ups, summarised with a ‘green’ or ‘red’ icon, for all the news and information websites responsible for 98% of all online engagement in each country.
The Nutrition Labels demonstrate what, ironically, may now be a counterintuitive idea: sometimes human intelligence is better than the artificial kind. The Nutrition Labels are produced by humans — journalists — who read every site laboriously and provide information about the its background, its financing and its adherence to nine universally agreed basic journalistic standards. Before NewsGuard writes anything negative about a site, its analysts call for comment. Algorithms don’t call for comment.
And unlike how algorithms currently operate, NewsGuard is transparent about its decisions and who is making them, and transparently corrects mistakes or changes its ratings if the sites change. Algorithms maintain that if they were transparent, sites would ‘game’ the system. We want sites to game our system — by adhering to our completely transparent nine criteria, and getting better at providing reliable journalism.
The national governments of EU Member States could take more steps to support news literacy through educational institutions and libraries. Librarians across the US are installing NewsGuard on the thousands of computers at their facilities. This is in advance of the platforms, search engines, and browsers themselves licensing the ratings and Nutrition Labels so that they will be ubiquitous — and so that these technology companies can begin to address a problem that they inadvertently but undeniably created.
The human approach to rating and reviewing news websites — rather than trying to review or fact-check individual articles after they have been published — scales well. This kind of large-scale global effort does, however, require the kind of investment more typical for companies such as NewsGuard rather than for NGOs that rely on annual donations or grants. NewsGuard does not presume to tell anyone what to read and does not block anything. Rather, NewsGuard arms people with the information, via the Nutrition Labels, to make their own choices. The digital platforms can choose to use NewsGuard or other providers of this kind of information that the platforms understand need to come from journalists, not technology companies. The two alternatives being most discussed today seem far less desirable: having governments decide on ‘good’ or ‘bad’ content or leaving it to the tech companies to jigger and re-jigger black-box algorithms that will never get it right and that will never be accountable.
