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Adblock Plus parent company Eyeo launches Trusted News for Chrome

Trusted News is a brand new browser extension for Google Chrome by Adblock Plus's parent company Eyeo that highlights the credibility of content on websites with the help of MetaCert's MetaCert Protocol.

If you don't know which news sources to trust, you may have come into contact with online services and browser extensions designed to assist you with that.

Fake news is a term that is used, some would say abused, on the Internet to describe untrustworthy content. Whether content is indeed untrustworthy or inaccurate is often a matter of opinion and not of facts.

Trusted News was designed to be an indicator of a site's trustworthiness so that users know right away whether content on the site is deemed trustworthy.

Trusted News for Chrome

trusted news

Trusted News adds an icon to Chrome's address bar that highlights whether a site is trustworthy. The extension knows three states for sites in regards to trustworthiness of content:

  • Trustworthy -- The site is trustworthy because it publishes content "based on facts and/or factual events".
  • Untrustworthy -- The site or page "knowingly publishes false and/or misleading information".
  • Unknown -- Site evaluation lacks data.

Trusted News uses five additional ratings for sites based on the type of published content:

  • Satire -- Site is known for publishing satirical content.
  • Biased -- Site publishes biased content.
  • Malicious -- Site distributes threats.
  • Clickbait -- Site uses misleading titles or descriptions.
  • User-Generated Content -- Content is created by third-parties.

The ratings are based on the MetaCert Protocol which uses data from "independent fact-checking organisations" such as PolitiFact, Snopes, Wikipedia and Zimdars. Only organisations that are not politically affiliated, independent of Trusted News, and transparent in their fact-checking processes have been selected to power the Trusted News extension.

The extension is available in beta right now. The company plans to improve the extension in the near future by adding feedback and reporting options to it among other things.

The developers of the extension promises that the extension keeps user browsing data private.

Closing Words

Do you need a browser extension that informs you whether content is trusted? It depends on several factors including your Internet activities and whether you trust the fact-checking organizations that Trusted News relies on to determine which companies and sites publish trustworthy content.

The extension seems to focus on sites right now and not individual pages. It should be clear that a granular approach would yield better results as some content on trustworthy sites may be untrustworthy, clickbait or biased, and vice versa.

Now You: Would you use an extension like Trusted News?

 

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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