In a an initiative aimed at identifying trustworthy news sources, in the latest attempt to combat online misinformation, on Thursday, Google, Facebook and some other tech firms joined global news organisations.
Microsoft and Twitter have also been agree to participate in the “Trust Project” with some 75 news organisations to tag the news stories meet meet standards for transparency and ethics.
The project leader Sally Lehrman of Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics did say,
“In today’s digitized and socially networked world, it’s harder than ever to tell what’s accurate reporting, advertising, or even misinformation,”.
The lead of the project also added that an increasingly sceptical public desires to know the expertise, enterprise and ethics that follow a news story.
Each online platform would develop “trust indicators” to assist readers “assess whether news comes from a credible source they can depend on,” added Lehrman.
The participant News organizations include the Washington Post, Mic and the Independent Journal Review in the US, the Economist, Canada’s Globe and Mail, the German press agency DPA, Italy’s La Repubblica and La Stampa, and Trinity Mirror, that includes the Mirror newspapers in Britain.
All the participants agree to core practices including transparency on funding and disclosure of the mission of the org; all the required details about the journalists behind stories; labelling of opinion of the journalist and factual articles, and references related to the way of carrying out the report.
Craig Newmark, the founder of craigslist, whose philanthropic fund is known to be an early supporter of the attempt says,
“News consumers need a way to tell media companies what we expect from them, the types of news we can count on and will pay for,”.
Other funding has been raised from Google, the Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Markkula Foundation.
“Authoritative journalism”
Google, Twitter, and Facebook have come under fire for permitting the spread of bogus news — some of which had been directed by Russia — before 2016 US election and in other countries.
Richard Gingras, Google’s vice president for news , said that the yet-to-be-determined labels will assist the online search giant to understand authoritative journalism better, and assist us to better surface it to the consumers.
Alex Hardiman, head of news products at Facebook, called this initiative to be a great next step in their ongoing efforts overall to increase people’s understanding of the sources and trustworthiness of news on their platform.
A contributing editor for the Search Engine Land blog, Greg Sterling, said the effort is good but might be much complex to accomplish its ultimate objective.
Sterling says that the readers should be able to see what is behind the labelling scheme. But he says they should be able to tell immediately whether an item is from a credible source, not have to spend time evaluating it based on a range of factors that are likely to be obscure to them.
