The new tool will make it possible to mark information sites, indicating them as reliable or unreliable
The unequal fight against fake news has a new ally from today. With NewsGuard, the new tool that allows to verify the reliability of news and information sites, we intend to put a stop to those sites that, for a few more clicks, do not hesitate to spam news without foundation, leveraging the fact that the vast majority of users of information on the Internet, barely stop to read the title of an article.
NewsGuard will have nine evaluation criteria, marked with a red cross or a green check mark. By June it will be applied to 90% of Italian information sites, but in the United States and Great Britain, it has already sifted more than two thousand websites. The idea came from Steven Brill and Godon Crovitz, and the consultants included former director of Ansa, Giampiero Gramaglia, co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former Prime Minister of Denmark and Secretary General of NATO. NewsGuard does not use site blocking or censorship, it simply labels the site according to nine evaluation criteria.
In this way the user is able to understand and evaluate the reliability of the source. The service avails itself of the collaboration of a team of journalists and professionals with gained experience in the field of information, and in Italy, as a first step, has decided to examine about two hundred information sites that generate 90% of the traffic of all news and information read and shared in the sea of the Italian Internet. Once you have installed this extension on your browser, just type in the address of the site you want to visit to have immediately available the ratings assigned, making the mark also visible on Google, Twitter or Facebook.