It may not shut down all forms of manipulated information, but it can stymie the flow of procedurally-generated blogs that are triggering so much confusion.
for the most part these services are both circle the wagon and circle jerk in nature. circle the wagon because journalist of the same beliefs want to protect each other and circle jerk because their choices will simply be beneficial to those they already agree with. the public as I mentioned before will just dismiss it as more of the same. the internet is good at holding them to account and they don't like it.
That's not to say RT is a usable source, I'm not particularly interested in their coverage here. But I'm also not very interested in hearing what news Michael Hayden wants me to listen to.
Sure they might oppose the sitting President but would they publish something which would undermine stated US diplomatic policy?
Citation needed. It almost seems that you invented something just as an attempt to demotivate people from taking a look. Normally I don't watch videos, but this time I got curious, and I've seen only "Belgian Imam embroiled in the scandal" in the chyron.
But while checking that, I've found out that the video has some real points:
- Co-founder of the NewsGuard: former columnist of the Wall Street Journal, for which EFF wrote that he "repeatedly gets his facts wrong about the NSA surveillance."
- In Advisory Board: Michael Hayden, former NSA and CIA director, Tom Ridge, former First secretary of Homeland Security, Richard Stengel, former Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy
Maybe there was some tampering here and there but I got the impression when I lived there that most people thought he was good and supported him.
Systematically and violently suppressing any political opposition is a lot more than 'some tampering here and there'.
So they will fail not only because nobody uses Edge.
I suspect not, because in general, nobody can agree on a definition of it.
That said, I have no idea if they have done so.
They also have a political analyst for NBC on their board. So I'm sure they are objective about NBC.
If you can‘t immediately spot the difference, you may be a late victim of post-modern relativism.
They also have transparent documentation of their ratings. Example: https://www.newsguardtech.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/rt....
The claim is not that all news is equally true; that would be ridiculous. The claim is that lists of trusted sources are ripe for abuse by the list-makers.
Consider this evil plan: suppose that I put a grassroots issue blog on the same list as 100 fake publications. Everyone will believe me, because, look: I was right one hundred times! That problem can even arise without intentional evil on the part of the list makers, just look at the history of spam blacklists. People, even teams of people, are not one hundred percent just one hundred percent of the time.
(I just called something evil, and you can't get any less postmodernist than that! ;)
Worth noting that PropOrNot already exists, and got a lot of positive coverage before people started to get suspicious. Its model was almost precisely what you describe: providing extensive lists of clearly Russia-affiliated sources like Sputnik News, then including a handful of high-quality domestic gadflies like Naked Capitalism without any justification.
This isn't just a hypothetical risk of such tools, its already an active problem on these exact topics.
Unfortunately most people in the US are not going to be able to believe that American propaganda exists.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3174009/DOMINIC-S...
Which do you read?
'Proper' journalism doesn't exist. Maybe it never did, it's just more obvious now. It's news entertainment.
A big thing missing from these discussions is the history of propaganda. I think a lot of people who are worried about "fake news" need to research that term.
Propaganda is still very prevalent especially as far as war goes. Do people really think that CNN tells them the real reasons for going to war? They will say whatever the Pentagon tells them. Why? Because no one is going to risk their lives and kill other people for some technical, strategic reason or just as part of a larger military campaign. People risk their lives to fight the "bad guys" who are "evil". They need to believe its a moral cause.
Don't let some giant company (or a small one) dictate what source your information comes from. If I used a Microsoft browser I would uninstall that plugin. Assuming that's an option.