NewsGuard in Italy: Our Progress and Partnerships
NewsGuard’s award-winning Italian editorial coverage, reporting, partnerships, research, and media literacy efforts have had broad impact.
By Virginia Padovese, Giulia Pozzi, and Sara Badilini | Published on September 4, 2023
Since NewsGuard’s launch in Italy in the summer of 2019, our Italian team has expanded its editorial coverage in the country — rating the trustworthiness of Italian-language news and information websites, monitoring the top false narratives that have spread in the country, and reporting on the risks posed by online mis- and disinformation. The team has also forged important partnerships across different sectors, including leading academic institutions and public libraries, among others. September 2023 also marks two years since the launch of the Italian Digital Media Observatory (IDMO), a 30-month long project to fight misinformation funded by the European Commission, of which NewsGuard is one of the eight founding partners.
NewsGuard’s Virginia Padovese was awarded the 2021 Amerigo Award for Journalism, which recognizes the journalists and editorial teams that report on the U.S. for the Italian public, in the category “websites.” Padovese also received the 2022 Nostalgia di Futuro Award (category Quality Information) “for the work of NewsGuard, which since 2018 has been committed to assessing the credibility and transparency of news websites, and in particular for the report on the main hoaxes spread online during the days leading up to the Italian political election of 25 September 2022.”
NewsGuard has rated the news and information sites that account for 96% of online engagement with the news in Italy. This high proportion of coverage means NewsGuard has produced detailed ratings for not only the most widely read sources but a large variety of more specialized, targeted publishers. View three example labels from the region here.
Italian academic research partnerships
NewsGuard has partnered with five Italian academic researchers studying misinformation and disinformation.
- Ca’ Foscari University of Venice is currently in its third year of licensing both NewsGuard’s Reliability Ratings and Misinformation Fingerprints. NewsGuard’s data have been most recently used in a study about polarization around climate change on social media, published on Nature.com, among other academic papers.
- Urbino University Carlo Bo has been licensing NewsGuard’s Reliability Ratings since 2021. Fabio Giglietto, Associate Professor at Carlo Bo, said that his team has used NewsGuard data in two key areas. “For development, we’ve integrated NewsGuard ratings into our R package, CooRnet, which detects coordinated sharing behavior. If users provide their subscription credentials, CooRnet generates a reliability score for each identified network by averaging the ratings of domains shared by the associated social media accounts.” said Giglietto. “In research, we often use NewsGuard ratings to gauge the spread of problematic information. While NewsGuard’s coverage varies by country, it remains a singular resource for comparative studies. They are the only platform that evaluates news websites using a consistent methodology across all the countries they assess,” Giglietto added.
- The University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI) licensed NewsGuard data for the CARISMA project (CAll for Regulation support In Social MediA) in 2023. Gianluca Nogara, computer scientist and assistant professor at SUPSI, said: “We have been using NewsGuard’s Reliability Ratings to study the evolution of user communities over time. In particular, NewsGuard has given us the possibility to accurately classify the clusters of users who share websites with low reliability and consequently low-quality or false news, thus identifying those communities which are inclined to negatively influence social media content in general.”
- La Sapienza University of Rome has been using NewsGuard Reliability Ratings for two years. Gabriele Etta, researcher at La Sapienza, told NewsGuard that his research benefited from NewsGuard’s data, which made it easier for him to assess the quality of news consumed by readers. Etta described NewsGuard as “pivotal for all those working in misinformation,” citing its “potential to capture previously hidden consumption dynamics [of news] and, therefore, to provide a more articulated information landscape.”
- In 2023, IMT Scuola Alti Studi Lucca renewed its partnership with NewsGuard for a second year. Its researchers recently used NewsGuard’s Reliability Ratings dataset for a paper headlined “Entropy-based detection of Twitter echo chambers.” “Our partnership with NewsGuard has provided us with a dependable vantage point to observe the phenomenon of misinformation on Twitter. The furnished data has emerged as an invaluable instrument, facilitating a comprehensive assessment of the news quality consumed across the diverse communities that engage in Twitter discussions,” said Manuel Pratelli, researcher at IMT.