Survey: Many Americans Love Their Fake News

NewsGuard, a media startup that rates the reliability of news sites, found a sharp increase last month in the popularity of sites that run questionable content, just as the impeachment of President Trump and the Democratic presidential race were heating up.

NewsGuard considers a site unreliable if it trafficks in faked or distorted news, fails to correct mistakes, or doesn’t disclose its political slant or reveal its owners and funders, among other criteria.
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Nearly 10 percent of the online stories followed most closely by readers in the United States in December came from such sites, a 20 percent increase from the previous month. NewGuard said the numbers indicate that the tolerance for fake news may be increasing right along with the intensity of political disputes, reports Boston.com.

NewsGuard tracks the popularity of untrustworthy news sites in four other countries — France, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Enthusiasm for these sites in the United States far outstrips that of the other countries. The British are especially resistant; news from unreliable sites made up just 1.2 percent of the most-followed stories among British Web surfers.

NewsGuard was founded in 2018 by Brill, founder of the American Lawyer magazine, and Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal. The company uses a team of veteran journalists to evaluate the trustworthiness of Internet sites. They don’t verify individual stories, but rate the journalistic and business practices of the sites that publish them. It also checks whether the site identifies its owners and financial backers, and identifies the people who write the stories

News sites that meet a minimum standard of reliability and transparency get the NewsGuard seal of approval — a green check mark that’s visible to Internet users who install NewsGuard software in their browsers. If they visit a site NewsGuard deems unreliable, they’ll see a red check mark.

NewsGuard found that 9.4 percent of the most shared and liked stories in the United States in December came from red-checked sites. For instance, LifeNews.com, an anti-abortion site, earned a red check mark for posting claims of a link between abortion and breast cancer. According to NewsGuard research, such claims are false. But LifeNews was popular in December, with a higher engagement rate in the United States than the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit Free Press, or the Dallas Morning News.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that more people read LifeNews. It means that a higher percentage of its readers clicked the “like” button or shared stories with their Facebook friends, making it more likely that stories from this site go viral.

LifeNews.com’s editor Steven Ertelt disputed Newsguard’s findings, and asserted that multiple studies since 1957 have found an abortion-breast cancer link.

NewsGuard is finding that medical information, like politics, attracts unreliable publishers. A health food site called Healthy Food House is cited by NewsGuard for repeatedly promoting “potentially dangerous and unproven natural health remedies.” Yet the NewsGuard-NewsWhip survey found that the Healthy Food House website attracts 62 times as much engagement as the website of the Mayo Clinic, one of the nation’s top medical centers.