Journalist and author Steven Brill, “an expert in fact versus fiction,” discussed the pros and cons of internet news, along with a pitch for a company he’s co-CEO of, in his talk hosted by The Investigative Post on Thursday, Oct. 23.
News literacy is changing, Brill says, and contrary to popular belief, the change is more significant than anyone has realized.
In elementary and middle school, young writers and readers are encouraged to always “check the source,” Brill says. But with the rise of artificial intelligence and increased usage of social media, simply checking the source is no longer sufficient to determine its credibility.
This challenge led to the creation of NewsGuard, a company that is running an artificial intelligence-assisted chatbot that rates news sources, such as local newspapers, on transparency and credibility.
With a team of journalists, the company has scanned sites responsible for 95 percent of user engagement in the countries wherein they function. Each source is then given a rating out of 100 points, in order to determine credibility and transparency. Factors examined include publishing false content, error correction, separating news and opinion, disclosing funding and advertising, and more.
In order to simplify the impact of social media on news and the importance of NewsGuard, Brill — its co-CEO — compared it to a library.
“Suppose you walk into a library. You see books, they’re arranged neatly according to their subject matter,” Brill said. “Now imagine, if instead, you walked into a library and there were just a million pieces of paper flying around– that’s your social media feed.”
Vaccine safety, election integrity, and basic science tend to be the largest sources of internet news fabrication, Brill noted. These controversies tend to get the most user engagement, both positively and negatively, fueling social media companies’ to further promote them, he said.
Brill listed examples of local news sources with high and low ratings. Buffalo’s highest ranking news outlets are the Investigative Post and WKBW (7 News), both with scores of 100 according to the NewsGuard rating system.The Buffalo Chronicle received a rating of 7.5, due to its habits of publishing false content, failures to correct errors and gather information responsibly, and lack of disclosure of the company’s ownership.
Brill’s cohost and NewsGuard senior editor Sofia Rubinson, warned how NewsGuard is seeing that “a lot of websites are coming up… from foreign governments [that are] trying to make it look like they have journalists on the ground in New York.”
Moving forward, NewsGuard has bigger plans than to just verify source credibility, Brill claimed. “We’re now working on a program where we distribute [news literacy education materials] a lot more widely,” he said.
With increased education about identifying misinformation online, individuals can begin to determine their personal beliefs without the fear of hearing from unreliable sources. According to Brill and his team, this would be life-changing in both the educational and professional realms.
When asked if things are getting better or worse, Brill only had one thing to say. “Yes.”
In the future, Brill hopes that NewsGuard will become more accessible to the general public, but even more so to students. Through increased education on news literacy, NewsGuard aims to equip both current and future generations with the tools to decipher fictional and factual information in a time where the difference is becoming much more difficult to notice.
The news desk can be reached at news@ubspectrum.com.
Photo: Courtesy of Aryan Vali Baharvandi
