04/07/2022
NewsGuard’s journalist-powered data enables tech platforms like GIPHY to vet user-generated content at scale for misinformation
Reliability Ratings and Misinformation Fingerprints can be used by a range of digital platforms to moderate user-generated content at scale
(April 7, 2022 — New York, NY) After more than a year of working together, NewsGuard and GIPHY, the image-sharing content platform and search engine, have published a joint case study highlighting how GIPHY’s content moderation team uses NewsGuard’s Reliability Ratings and Misinformation Fingerprints datasets to identify and address content that risks spreading misinformation through its platform.
GIPHY’s library of animated images, known as GIFs, reaches more than 700 million people each day with more than 10 billion pieces of content, through integrations with platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Apple, TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat. To manage the volume and variety of content on its platform, GIPHY deploys a content moderation process that addresses a range of online harms – one of which is misinformation.
GIPHY teamed up with NewsGuard starting in 2020, incorporating NewsGuard’s human-curated data and expertise into its moderation team’s policies and practices.
GIPHY’s trust and safety team uses NewsGuard’s browser extension and client dashboard to keep abreast of new and emerging false claims and the sites that might be spreading them. GIPHY uses NewsGuard’s data in two ways: First, GIPHY uses NewsGuard’s site Reliability Ratings as part of its process for evaluating publishers who launch accounts on the GIPHY platform. NewsGuard has rated all the news and information sources that account for 98% of engagement online, using nine basic, apolitical criteria of journalistic practice. Second, GIPHY relies on NewsGuard’s constantly updated catalog of false narratives spreading online across all platforms and the open internet – its Misinformation Fingerprints – to ensure the trust and safety team stays abreast of the falsehoods that may appear in GIFs on the platform. The team discusses new Misinformation Fingerprint entries during its regular meetings, enabling its moderators to link questionable content they come across on the platform with emerging falsehoods chronicled by NewsGuard.
“New claims pop up each day, and NewsGuard is usually where we find out about the latest myths in the first place, before we start to see evidence of them in our content,” said Marc Leone, Director of Trust and Safety at GIPHY. “The way the details of misinformation are flagged and laid out by NewsGuard allows our team to easily take certain actions across our platform.”
In addition to using the Fingerprints, GIPHY also uses NewsGuard data in its Quality Assurance processes, through which its moderation team regularly searches the platform for content that may violate some of its policies. The search terms, keywords and hashtags associated with each NewsGuard Misinformation Fingerprint entry enable GIPHY’s team to quickly search through its library for content in violation of its misinformation policy, such as a GIF advancing a false claim about COVID-19 or vaccines.
“Content sharing happens at such a rapid pace that partnering with industry experts like NewsGuard to conduct research allows us to focus on developing policies and practices to keep our platform safe,” said Jessica Gremmell, Moderation Manager at GIPHY.
For Leone and Gremmell, the intuitive interface of NewsGuard’s Insights Dashboard is easy to navigate. Moreover, the NewsGuard browser extension works seamlessly within the moderation team’s process for researching new publishers, providing important context and trustworthiness indicators without requiring moderators to leave their workflow. With access to NewsGuard’s rapid response monitoring team, GIPHY staffers are also able to use NewsGuard’s editorial expertise as a sounding board to talk through complex, emerging issues and get a journalistic assessment on claims they’ve seen online.
“GIPHY is an exemplar of a platform that leverages proactive policies to minimize problematic content and maintain a safe user experience, rather than deploying reactive policies that only come in response to negative press or other external pressures,” said Sarah Brandt, EVP of Partnerships at NewsGuard. “We’re delighted that our journalist-powered research can aid GIPHY in this process, and we welcome more like-minded platforms to follow their lead.”
“GIPHY is meant to provide fun and engaging forms of creativity of self-expression,” said Leone. “We realize how important our content is and how it can influence people across different platforms, so we want to do our best to ensure misinformation is not spread.”
Read the case study
About NewsGuard
Launched in March 2018 by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard provides credibility ratings and detailed “Nutrition Labels” for thousands of news and information sources. NewsGuard rates all the news and information sources that account for 95% of online engagement across the US, UK, Germany, France, and Italy.
NewsGuard’s ratings are conducted by trained journalists using nine apolitical criteria of journalistic practice, including whether a news source repeatedly publishes false content, whether it regularly corrects or clarifies errors, and whether it avoids deceptive headlines. Based on the criteria, each source receives an overall trust rating, a trust score of 0-100, a score on each of the nine criteria, and a detailed “Nutrition Label” explaining the rating and providing examples of the site’s editorial practices. Advertisers, advertising agencies and advertising tech companies license NewsGuard’s ratings to direct their programmatic advertising toward legitimate journalism and avoid misinformation. For more information, including to download the browser extension and review the ratings process, visit newsguardtech.com.
About GIPHY
GIPHY’s mission is to animate your world. GIPHY is the visual communication platform where thousands of artists, brands, and pop culture moments make everyday expression a little more moving. GIPHY empowers users to discover and share the GIFs, Clips, and Stickers that make your conversations more positive, more expressive, and more you. Be Animated.