Forum Discussion
Add NewsGuard score to the address bar
NewsGuard service is not reliable and honest at all.
they say they wanna help people identify unreliable news websites and that sorta thing,
but what they actually do is they mark all the news channels and websites that are from other countries (mainly countries from eastern hemisphere that are not allies of the U.S) "Unreliable and not trust worthy" and then mark news channels like Foxnews, CNN etc as reliable and trustworthy. I'm not gonna get into politics but things aren't as black and white as this NewsGuard services is trying to show.
their service is clearly biased and manipulative.
I think Microsoft should remove it from their Edge Android version and if they ever wanna add such service to their browsers, first make sure they are trustworthy and fair.
I think that, right now, you can fight disinformation with education only. What NewsGuard is trying to do (I suppose) is giving a quick warning if the website you are visiting usually posts false content just to click-bait (I think, as they think, this is the most important factor) so the average Italian person knows if "The EU is asking 1000billion Euros to Italy because they want Italy to fail" is posted from a blog that usually posts fake news or not.
But you can't read the whole article thinking that it is 100% true because there is the green badge on NewsGuard.
Yes I agree that education is the only way to fight propaganda and false/fake news but sometimes even that is not enough. one can't simply rely on one's own education and only receive the news from one source (or multiple sources from the same side).
there have been countless times that our own domestic (government backed) news channels like Fox,NBC,CNN,NYTimes etc posted fake news. incidents like Ukraine crisis, Israel, Syria etc. I remember when Donald Trump ordered missile strike on Syria based on false accusations that they used chemical weapons against their own citizen (which was outright lie), all domestic medias praised that action but when i reached out to other news channels like Russia Today RT.com or Chinese and Asian news channels, they had proof that it was all false accusations.
another, in that strike 41 missiles were fired but only 6 hit their targets because of Syria's and Russia's very old air defense were present there. but our news websites said they were all successful and none of them missed, then Russian websites and their minister of defense showed videos and picture that proved otherwise.
now visit RT.com with NewsGuard, it gives you a ridiculous red mark. I could go on and on and write a book about these dirty stuff happening.
when countries not allies with U.S Government post news and specially something that is the opposite of what western news media posts, it gets marked red as unreliable or any other silly tags they throw at them.
In the recent years I've found myself in a position that I need other sources from different countries to get my news from and shouldn't merely rely on domestic channels. NewsGuard and similar technologies are called the modern brainwashing. their target population is Not the educated people, it's exactly the Opposite type of people.