10/22/2020

NewsGuard teams up with Microsoft to create media literacy quiz

Quiz to help voters spot hoaxes and hidden agendas ahead of Election Day

(New York, October 22, 2020) With Election Day less than two weeks away, NewsGuard has worked with Microsoft to create a non-partisan interactive quiz that will help voters sift through the deluge of information circulating online about the issues and the voting process.

The quiz, which asks users, “Do you Know Your News?,” features questions designed around the nine criteria NewsGuard uses to rate and review websites. The content is intended to inform voters about where to find accurate information about casting their ballot, how to avoid misinformation, and the importance of thinking critically about their news sources.

While the quiz is designed for voters of all ages, it can also be used by high school and university students to help them build media literacy skills.

“There’s been so much confusion and competing information surrounding the election that even the savviest news consumers might be misled,” said Sarah Brandt, NewsGuard’s Vice President of News Literacy Programs. “Our intention with this quiz is to help people build confidence in their ability to distinguish rumor from reality — and to let them have a little fun in the process.”

“A first line of defense against disinformation is media literacy – the ability to think critically about the information you are consuming,” said Meredith Berger, Senior Manager at Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program. “This quiz will help people build their skills and increase individual resilience.”  

This initiative is part of a broader partnership between NewsGuard and Microsoft. The two companies have worked closely since 2018, when Microsoft became a sponsor of NewsGuard’s News Literacy Program, through which more than 750 libraries in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Italy receive free access to NewsGuard’s browser extension. Today, all users of Microsoft’s Edge desktop browser can install NewsGuard’s extension at no cost, and NewsGuard’s ratings are directly integrated in the Edge Mobile application. Other units at Microsoft use NewsGuard’s ratings, including Bing, MSN, and Microsoft’s research department.

To put your media literacy skills to the test, take the quiz at KnowMyNews.com.

 

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 websites. NewsGuard rates all the news and information websites that account for 95% of online engagement across the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, and Italy. NewsGuard products include NewsGuard, HealthGuard, and BrandGuard, which helps marketers concerned about their brand safety, and the Misinformation Fingerprints catalog of top hoaxes.

NewsGuard rates each site based on nine apolitical criteria of journalistic practice, including whether a site repeatedly publishes false content, whether it regularly corrects or clarifies errors, and whether it avoids deceptive headlines. It awards weighted points for each criterion and sums them up; a score of less than 60 earns a “Red” rating, while 60 and above earns a “Green” rating, which indicates it is generally reliable.

NewsGuard’s ratings and Nutrition Labels can be licensed by internet service providers, browsers, news aggregators, education companies, and social media and search platforms in order to make NewsGuard’s information about news websites available to their users. Consumers can access these ratings by purchasing a subscription to NewsGuard, which costs $2.95/month and includes access to NewsGuard’s browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox and its mobile app for iOS and Android. The extension is available for free on Microsoft’s Edge browser through a license agreement with Microsoft, and NewsGuard’s ratings can also be accessed free through the Edge mobile browser. Hundreds of public libraries globally receive free access to use NewsGuard’s browser extension on their public-access computers to give their patrons more context for the news they encounter online. For more information, including to download the browser extension and review the ratings process, visit newsguardtech.com.

 

Contacts

  • Steven Brill, Co-CEO, steven.brill@newsguardtech.com, +1 212-332-6301
  • Gordon Crovitz, Co-CEO, gordon.crovitz@newsguardtech.com, +1 212-332-6407
  • Sarah Brandt, Vice President of News Literacy Programs, sarah.brandt@newsguardtech.com