The leading dataset for studying online misinformation and disinformation

NewsGuard data powers research studying misinformation, electoral integrity, media literacy, and other aspects of online news consumption habits. Our news source Reliability Ratings offer an independent, constantly-updated benchmark of news quality, and our Misinformation Fingerprints provide a curated catalog of the major misinformation narratives spreading online — and the sources that promote them.

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Partners

“[NewsGuard] offers what appears to be the most comprehensive data on website credibility that has been assembled to date. We expect that it will prove essential in our research.”

Brendan Nyhan

James O. Freedman Presidential Professor, Department of Government, Dartmouth College

White Paper

Research Backing NewsGuard's Reliability Ratings

This white paper summarizes research into misinformation's impact and potential solutions, illustrating how NewsGuard offers an effective approach backed by research. The paper also describes research projects that have been conducted using NewsGuard data.

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Case Study

Read about NewsGuard's data and the "Iffy" Quotient

The University of Michigan’s School of Information Center for Social Media Responsibility created a metric called the “Iffy Quotient,” which uses NewsGuard data and measures the percentage of the most popular news URLs on Facebook and Twitter that are from “iffy” sites that frequently publish unreliable information.

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Case Study

Read about how NewsGuard's data is used by the German Marshall Fund

Through its Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative, the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), a nonpartisan think tank, studies societal issues at the intersection of technology and democracy and makes policy recommendations for the U.S. and Europe. GMF has used NewsGuard’s Reliability Ratings data since early 2020 to conduct ongoing analyses of misinformation and its threats to democracy.

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Case Study

Analyzing Content Recommendation Algorithms

Researchers at Dartmouth, Indiana, and South Florida use NewsGuard’s Index to develop improved content recommendation algorithms. A project led by Brendan Nyhan from Dartmouth College, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia from the University of South Florida, and Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini from Indiana University used the Index to study how to improve the diversity of information circulating on social media.

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Other use cases and information:

08/26/2022
University of Oxford
Quantifying the “infodemic”: People turned to trustworthy news outlets during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic

02/01/2022
Stanford University
Exposure to Untrustworthy Websites in the 2020 US Election

01/31/2022
Indiana University – Observatory on Social Media
News Sharing Networks Expose Information Polluters on Social Media

12/31/2021
Northeastern University
Engagement Outweighs Exposure to Partisan and Unreliable News within Google Search

12/23/2021
Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice and others
Growing climate polarisation on social media

11/02/2021
New York University & Université Grenoble Alpes
Understanding engagement with U.S. (mis)information news sources on Facebook

08/01/2021
The Carter Center
The Big Lie and Big Tech

07/01/2021
New York University Center for Social Media and Politics
Cracking Open the News Feed: Exploring What U.S. Facebook Users See and Share with Large-Scale Platform Data

04/14/2021
Los Alamos National Laboratory
“Thought I’d Share First” and Other Conspiracy Theory Tweets from the COVID-19 Infodemic: Exploratory Study

01/27/2021
The German Marshall Fund of the United States
Social Media Engagement with Deceptive Sites Reached Record Highs in 2020

12/09/2020
The German Marshall Fund of the United States
Health Sites Built Coordinated Networks of Facebook Pages to Spread False Content, Increase Ad Revenue

11/16/2020
University of Michigan Center for Social Media Responsibility
Racism, election overtake COVID-19 as ‘iffy’ news on popular social sites

10/12/2020
The German Marshall Fund of the United States
New Study by Digital New Deal Finds Engagement with Deceptive Outlets Higher on Facebook Today Than Run-up to 2016 Election

08/19/2020
Avaaz
Facebook’s Algorithm: A Major Threat to Public Health

07/22/2020
University of Michigan Center for Social Media Responsibility
People ‘fly to quality’ news on social sites when faced with uncertainty

05/01/2020
The German Marshall Fund of the United States
The Rise of the Parapolitical Sites as the Leading False-Content Producers

03/25/2020
The German Marshall Fund of the United States
New Report: U.S. Information Ecosystem Woefully Unprepared Amidst Coronavirus and 2020 Election Disinformation

07/23/2019
University of Michigan Center for Social Media Responsibility
U-M’s Iffy Quotient shows steady drop of questionable information on social media, partners with NewsGuard for better data