With the growing malpractices of fetching more visitors in order to generate higher revenue, several websites publish news or any other content which have no solid evidence, proof or cannot be trusted. To solve this problem, tech giant Eyeo has released a browser extension TrustedNews which identifies and reports about a content being trustworthy or fake.
Eyeo utilizes sources such as Snopes and Politifact, which are fact-checking websites, in order to identify content which cannot be trusted. For installing TrustedNews, the user needs to visit the official website trusted-news.com and the option to install the extension is available on the main page. However, the tool is compatible only with Chrome web browser for now and the company is expected to launch it for Mozilla Firefox and Safari shortly.
After downloading TrustedNews extension, the user can see its dedicated icon on the top right corner of the window. Once you visit a news website and if the displayed content is reliable, a green tick mark appears on the icon as an approval for the information. You can also view a short summary regarding the justification as to why a particular content could be trusted.
Apart from pointing out the faux information oriented content, TrustedNews also works towards scrutinising and displaying news which is promotional and biased, which leads to clickbait and something that could affect your system with malware.
Eyeo works concertedly with MetaCert Protocol in order to point out fake, biased, satirical or user-generated content on TrustedNews. However, the limitations of its sources allow it to check the reliability of only a limited number of websites and the company claims to extend its operating range in the coming days. TrustedNews will enable a feature shortly which will allow users to provide feedback on the rating given to the websites which will aid in increasing the amount of database available with the extension.
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