03/14/2024

Amid Mounting False Claims Online Directed at Brands, NewsGuard Announces Custom Brand Misinformation Monitoring Service Featuring Alerts and Journalistic Debunks

With social media trolls and AI-powered bots targeting brands at an unprecedented scale, companies can now secure their brand reputations with NewsGuard’s Custom Brand Misinformation Monitoring services, augmenting existing media monitoring efforts by identifying false claims and providing detailed, transparent debunks

(March 14, 2024 — New York) NewsGuard, the leading provider of news reliability data and machine-readable false narratives for reputation management, public relations, and media monitoring companies, today announces a “Custom Brand Misinformation Monitoring” service for brands that protects them beyond traditional media monitoring capabilities.

NewsGuard’s Custom Brand Misinformation Monitoring service provides early warnings and tracking of provably false narratives related to a brand, with analysis culminating in a NewsGuard report providing brands with a detailed assessment of the claim by an independent, accountable journalism organization that can be used publicly to debunk a false narrative. NewsGuard’s independent research debunks provably false information and provides stakeholders with accurate, transparent, and evidence-backed insights to defend brand reputation.

“It’s no longer enough for communications executives to have media monitoring tools summarize sentiment and coverage of their brands online,” said Steven Brill, co-CEO at NewsGuard. “They also need the ability to track new threats from across the open web and have access to an independent rebuttal done with the highest journalistic standards and full transparency. NewsGuard’s Custom Misinformation Monitoring Service gives communications executives early warnings about potential misinformation, provides real-time reports of emerging harmful narratives, and delivers transparent and accountable debunkings of false claims designed to be cited including publicly as part of communications responses.”

NewsGuard provides PR teams with independent, factual information when brand misinformation spreads online

Brill added that the new service should not be confused with more conventional public relations advocacy. “NewsGuard will not be relevant,” he explained, “in a situation where a company believes, even rightfully, that it has been the subject of public criticism that is a matter of opinion or policy debate. In these situations, the company may have good reason to seek help in challenging the legitimacy of such arguments or the credentials of its advocates. But that is not a service NewsGuard provides. Rather, this service is limited to addressing the new and increasingly widespread phenomenon of provably false narratives attacking companies and brands and to providing up to the minute warnings and information about the disinformation campaigns behind them.”

“One well-known example from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic is the totally unfounded attacks on telecommunications companies in the U.S. and Europe, claiming that 5G technology was the cause of the virus,” added NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz. “We determined that these fabricated claims, which led to violent attacks against telecommunications employees, were pushed by Kremlin propagandists because Russia was behind in developing the technology and wanted to discredit it. Today, that kind of one-off attack on a commercial product is becoming a near-daily occurrence, plaguing retailers, packaged goods companies, healthcare providers, financial services firms, and all other varieties of brands, undermining them and reducing the trust required for the smooth functioning of free markets.”

Round-the-Clock Protection

“Using NewsGuard’s proprietary and ever-expanding list of known bad actors and our unique misinformation expertise, NewsGuard’s Custom Brand Misinformation Monitoring service monitors and detects when mentions of a brand spike among known bad actors on social media and the open web, yielding instant alerts and then detailed debunks,” said Sarah Brandt, EVP Partnerships at NewsGuard. “This service provides brands with round-the-clock alerts, adding a new level of protection for brands as well as providing detailed explanations and debunks of false claims made in targeted misinformation attacks.”

How it works 

• A brand contracts with NewsGuard on a retained basis, which provides 24/7 coverage by a dedicated misinformation analyst who monitors for attacks on the brand by malign actors online and on social media that NewsGuard has identified for negative information being spread online about brands.
• The analysts, who monitor social media and the open web using a combination of AI tools and proprietary in-house research methods, alert brands when developing attacks that include provably false information about them emerge.
• Brands can instruct NewsGuard analysts to further research the false narrative, at which point they will begin producing a detailed “Misinformation Fingerprint” documenting the description of the false claim. This yields a fact-based, transparent, and accountable debunking of the claim and an analysis of how the false claim originated and spread, with examples of the false claim circulating online in multiple languages and across regions. See samples of previous brand-related false narratives documented by NewsGuard analysts, targeting brands including Barilla Pasta and Target.
• Brands are then free to cite NewsGuard’s independently produced, fact-based debunk in their communication responses to stakeholders, augmenting their defense with credible, journalistic analysis and data.

To learn more about NewsGuard’s Custom Brand Misinformation Monitoring service and how it can bolster your current crisis communications response function with independently verified data, email us at partnerships@newsguardtech.com.

 

About NewsGuard 

Founded by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard provides transparent tools to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies. Since launching in 2018, its global staff of trained journalists and information specialists has collected, updated, and deployed more than 6.9 million data points on more than 35,000 news and information sources, and cataloged and tracked all the top false narratives spreading online.

NewsGuard’s analysts, powered by multiple AI tools, operate the trust industry’s largest and most accountable dataset on news. These data are deployed to fine-tune and provide guardrails for generative AI models, enable brands to advertise on quality news sites and avoid propaganda or hoax sites, provide media literacy guidance for individuals, and support democratic governments in countering hostile disinformation operations targeting their citizens.

Among other indicators of the scale of its operations is that NewsGuard’s apolitical and transparent criteria have been applied by its analysts to rate news sources accounting for 95% of online engagement with news across nine countries.