Note to Users: Making Our Scoring System Clearer

You will soon notice that we have changed how we publicly display our scores for each website when you see the NewsGuard shield, such as in search results or in social media feeds. We’re making this adjustment so that the more precise nature of our scoring, based on our assessment of how the website adheres to our nine basic, apolitical criteria of journalistic practice, no longer displays a simple “Red” or “Green,” but instead immediately highlights the more nuanced, specific score the site receives.

Until now the Red has been used as a shorthand way to denote scores below 60 out of 100 possible points, based on adherence to the nine weighted criteria; a score of 60 or above received a Green. Now, readers will see the actual percentage score out of 100 points as soon as they see the NewsGuard icon.

For example, you might see the icons below instead of a Green and Red mark:

Nothing has changed in our scoring of websites, in the process for how we score them or in the guidance that we provide. (For more information about the process for scoring websites, click here.)

Why have we decided to provide the precise score out of 100 rather than simply a Green or Red rating? In our start-up years, the Red of Green had the virtue of immediately conveying that we were in the business of making distinctions related to the journalistic standards of the thousands of news sites. When we launched in 2018, sites publishing misinformation had already proliferated across what had become a digital landscape that offered information and misinformation on the same screen with no distinction, making it impossible for news consumers, brands and others to tell untrustworthy sites from generally trustworthy sites.

The disadvantage of this binary display, however, is that it fails to communicate the relative scores that sites receive. Over time, in addition to the Red or Green, we added the point score to the detailed Nutrition Label. Now we provide the point score as the first measure readers see when they encounter a news article.

The simple Red-Green approach did not capture the nuance in our scoring of sites. In the case of sites rated Red, our summary for readers does not say “Do not read” the way a red traffic light signals “Stop!” Instead, our guidance urges that readers proceed with caution (and more strongly urges caution for the sites with the lowest scores). We are not in the business of telling anyone not to read anything. Similarly, the summaries we use for Green sites also have messages of caution for sites, for example, that score 65 points compared to those scoring 95 points.

That varying language will continue to introduce and summarize each website’s score depending on the precise score. The language of this guidance that consumers are given is as follows:

100 (or 100%): “High Credibility: This website adheres to all nine standards of credibility and transparency.”

75-99 (or 75%-99%): “Generally Credible: This website mostly adheres to basic standards of credibility and transparency.”

60-74 (or 60%-74%): “Credible with Exceptions: This website generally maintains basic standards of credibility and transparency—with significant exceptions.”

40-59 (40%-59%): “Proceed with Caution: This website is unreliable because it fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards.”

 0-39 (or 0% to 39%): “Proceed with Maximum Caution: This website is unreliable because it severely violates basic journalistic standards.”

Now, as NewsGuard has become more widely used – and used by different constituencies for different purposes – it has become apparent to us that continuing to present the binary Red-Green divide oversimplifies and risks obscuring the precise work that we do. It also is no longer consistent with how NewsGuard’s various constituencies now use our data.

Consumers who use our browser extension to understand more about the news sources presented to them online, including educators and students who use NewsGuard for news literacy training, will benefit from the emphasis on, and attention paid to, the sources’ actual scores and adherence to each of the criteria.

Advertisers who use NewsGuard to decide where they are comfortable placing their ads often benefit from the Red/Green dividing line that the 60 or below score conveys, and they will continue to be able to do so. But others already benefit from various options that we provide for applying our scoring data and associated metadata, so that they can customize their choices of sites to include or exclude in their advertising purchases. For more on this array of ad protection choices, click here.

Likewise, national security officials charged with protecting democracies from disinformation are already finding our parsing of the NewsGuard scoring data – and how we use it to identify, track and connect hundreds of popular, specific false narratives — far more useful than our binary Red-Green divide. That’s because they use the work of NewsGuard analysts to identify new false narratives and the malign actors that spread them, with the aim of monitoring and countering the narratives. These false narratives include disinformation on topics including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, election integrity, the safety of 5G technology and COVID-19 risks.

As before, the NewsGuard scores may change during regular updates, in which case the changes are always accompanied by a notice on the Nutrition Label.

 But our criteria and process for scoring sites remain unchanged. What’s changed is that readers will now have access to the precise score directly in their search results and social media feeds.