It’s 2019, and we still don’t know what to do about fake news. Online disinformation is more powerful than ever. It’s a tough problem, especially because it sometimes requires a shift in readers’ beliefs to solve. In other words, without some kind of technical solution or a massive cultural shift, the fake news problem won’t solve itself. That’s why Microsoft’s Edge mobile browser is making a small change. On Android and iOS devices, the Microsoft Edge app now comes with a built-in fake news detector called NewsGuard. It’s an extension of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy program and was first announced earlier this month.
Although NewsGuard is not enabled by default, anyone using Edge can enable it with a simple toggle in the settings menu.
For now, NewsGuard’s ratings focus on U.S. websites, but it also includes major international sites. Sites like TechCrunch have received NewsGuard’s approval, indicating that the content it presents to users is truthful. However, as the Guardian, the Daily Mail didn’t fare so well.
The analytics that drive NewsGuard’s ratings are impressive, though they present another issue that makes fighting fake news particularly difficult. Even if news sources are evaluated against a set of factors, there is still a degree of subjective judgment that is necessary to make these decisions.
NewsGuard is co-led by Gordon Crovitz, former editor of The Wall Street Journal, and Steven Brill. Like other news experiments, NewsGuard relies on a team of people , not algorithms. The company counts former CIA director Michael Hayden and Information founder Jessica Lessin as two of its advisors.
Edge isn’t a very popular browser, but it’s an interesting case study in the fight against low-quality information online. It also illustrates the age of fake news: The users who most need a fake news detector are the ones who are least likely to use the app. Microsoft Edge’s experiment with NewsGuard isn’t the solution to the problem, but having some kind of news verification tool built into the browser could be a step in that direction.
