This company is rating news sites to help tackle misinformation online

A person is seen typing on a keyboard in this stock photo. (Ron Lach/Pexels)

In an effort to help tackle increased misinformation online, NewsGuard has launched its ratings system in Canada to help Canadians decipher whether the information they're getting is trustworthy.

NewsGuard is a service that provides ratings and credibility scores for news websites, and has been active in the U.S. and parts of Europe, including the U.K., France, Germany and Italy, since 2019.

The company launched the initiative in Canada last month amid what its managing editor described as a “critical time.”

Chine Labbe, NewsGuard's managing editor and vice-president for partnerships in Europe and Canada, told CTVNews.ca that there has been a "dramatic increase" in online misinformation since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"It even brought the WHO to coin a new term -- the infodemic of misinformation," Labbe said in a Zoom interview on Tuesday from Geneva. "And Canada has not been spared from it."

According to a February 2021 study from Statistics Canada, 96 per cent of Canadians who searched for COVID-19 information online believe they saw false or misleading information during the first months of the pandemic. The study says that half of those surveyed then shared COVID-19 information without knowing if it was reliable.

Labbe said the data highlights the importance of a source rating tool like NewsGuard to help Canadians figure out whether the news they are reading online is trustworthy, without censoring content.

"It's really just to help readers navigate this very complex ecosystem of online information and distinguish between reliable sources of information and unreliable sources," she said.

Labbe said NewsGuard has rated the news and information websites responsible for 90 per cent of the news consumed and shared online in Canada so far, in both English and French, and is working to hit 95 per cent of online engagement.

"Our goal is not to distribute good points and say, 'OK, these are the best outlets.' It's really to help readers make the distinction between the sources that are not trying to be responsible, and the sources that are doing responsible journalism," Labbe said.

HOW IT WORKS

Labbe said that NewsGuard's ratings system is curated by a team of trained journalists and is presented similar to that of a food nutrition label.

The label provides consumers with guidance on each site's credibility based on nine journalistic criteria following basic practices of transparency.

"The criteria is really just the foundation of basic journalism," Labbe said. "Do you correct your errors in a transparent manner when you make errors? Does the site tell you who owns it? Or does it hide potential conflicts of interest? Things like that."

Based on a site's performance on the nine criteria, it is assigned a Red or Green rating and 0-100 trust score, indicating its credibility. If a site gets 60 points or higher, it will be rated as green. Those below this threshold will get a red rating.

NewsGuard has given CTVNews.ca a green rating with a trust score of 87.

Should a site get a red rating, Labbe said NewsGuard will contact them to provide analysis on their reasoning and ask for comment to include in the rating label. She said some sites are open to collaborating with NewsGuard in order to get their rating up, while others are not.

"We are very transparent, we tell them exactly what is missing and what they could do to improve and get a better score. But some sites, some red rated sites don't want to communicate with us for obvious reasons," Labbe said.

She noted that this can hinder the overall fight against misinformation.

"When we speak about fighting misinformation, we have often focused on the negative part of it, which is combating misinformation spreaders, defunding those sites, but there's also the positive aspect of it, which is helping the credible news sites that are doing responsible journalism… gain back the trust of their readers," she explained.

However, Labbe says NewsGuard's services are not voluntary as the company does not take funding from the sites they rate.

"We will rate those sites whether or not they want us to… so they can't decide to be part of the system or not," she said.

According to NewsGuard, the company has rated more than 7,000 websites globally.

NewsGuard is sponsored by Microsoft and allows users of its Edge browser to have access to the ratings plug-in extension for free. Those who use Chrome, Firefox, and Safari can subscribe to the NewsGuard browser extension for $2.95 a month.

In addition, those using the Neeva search engine can see the NewsGuard ratings automatically for free.

Labbe said NewsGuard is also in discussions with Canadian education officials to make its ratings available to teachers and students at no charge "in the near future."

While Labbe says NewsGuard hopes to temper misinformation, she said the company is "fighting an ever-growing enemy" and it will take more than their rating system to do so.

"The fight against misinformation is... so vast that I don't think we alone will be the one to have a perfect solution. I think we're one tool and... we are convincing a lot of people to change and think about whether their news is reliable, which is a good start," Labbe said.