Survey Claims UK People Would Support Fake News Alerts from ISPs

A new YouGov survey of 1,017 UK adults, which was commissioned by NewsGuard and conducted between 27th June to 2nd July 2019, has found that 51% of respondents would trust their broadband ISP or mobile network operator more if they pro-actively alerted users as to the quality of a news website being accessed.

Before we get started it’s important to state that NewsGuard has a vested interest in the results of YouGov’s survey. The organisation uses “experienced … journalism to fight false news, misinformation, and disinformation,” not least by analysing and ranking websites in order to identify how trustworthy they are.

At present NewsGuard works via optional extensions (plugins) on your web browser but they’ve also been trying to get broadband ISPs to integrate their ranking and labels system into their networks (here), which could in theory result in internet users being automatically notified (e.g. warning pages) – as an optional feature – about the trustworthiness of a news site they’re trying to load.

In keeping with that the organisation has been keen to show that there is interest among consumers in such a feature and hence the new survey.

However, this sort of approach is not without its own issues of accuracy and political sensitivity, as shown when users of Microsoft Edge were recently warned not to trust the Daily Mail website (Guardian). The warning was later removed and no doubt some would agree with that particular alert, although equally it’s important to be careful about doing anything that might hinder access to free speech or different opinions and views.

Similarly it’s unclear how this sort of system will work when they squeeze down to focus upon smaller sites and blogs, which may lack the same large budgets and army of lawyers as mainstream newspapers. A risk may thus exist from the threat of big media trampling over new online alternatives that cannot so easily defend themselves.

The timing of all this also has relevance to the Government’s new ‘Online Harms White Paper‘, which among other things proposed to establish a regulator for internet content that could be tasked with forcing websites to remove bad content (e.g. hate speech, fake news) and even blocking or imposing fines upon those that fail to comply.

EdVaizey MP, Advisor to NewsGuard, said:

“This survey shows there is real concern in the UK with the plague of misinformation online, including delivered through the Silicon Valley social media and search companies. The good news is that it is within the control of UK broadband and mobile phone providers to help solve this problem for the families who use their services to access the internet.

With two thirds of people in the UK saying they would find information about the reliability of news websites valuable and most saying they would trust their internet or mobile phone provider more just for providing this kind of information, there is a big opportunity for the providers to do more to protect UK families from misinformation and hoaxes online.

As the “Online Harms White Paper” said, companies that provide information from services such as NewsGuard would reduce harms and show a duty of care online.”

Steven Brill, NewsGuard Co-CEO, told ISPreview.co.uk:

“UK citizens are rightly concerned about the amount of misinformation online targeting their families, which includes false reporting about health issues such as vaccines. NewsGuard is a practical, easy to use product that censors or blocks nothing while providing information about the reliability of any website purporting to publish news.”

The NewsGuard browser extension is currently free to consumers, but in the very near future they plan to begin charging for access to those who are not having it provided to them from their ISP or mobile provider (access will remain free for libraries and schools). Judging by the above survey, getting people to pay for this sort of feature could prove challenging but there may be enough to make it viable.

Meanwhile broadband ISPs have generally and perhaps correctly tended to resist the notion of becoming gatekeepers for online content, except where law and legislation demand. As such it seems reasonable to expect that they may not introduce such features voluntarily or without significant political pressure being applied. In that sense much may yet depend upon the outcome of the Online Harms paper.

In any case if internet providers did introduce it then the feature would be optional, which is perhaps for the best since the rising adoption of features like DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) seems likely to prevent this sort of functionality from working in the first place. In the meantime yours truly still finds it perfectly possible to judge the quality of a site without needing a filter to tell me.