NewsGuard - News Trust Ratings

NewsGuard Technologies

About this app

NewsGuard's reliability ratings for news and information sources help users make decisions about which news sources to trust—and avoid misinformation and disinformation.

Our ratings, scores, and Nutrition Labels for websites are displayed next to links on search engines and social media platforms and cover all the news websites accounting for 95% of online engagement.

Ratings are conducted by a team of experienced journalists using nine basic, apolitical journalistic criteria. Each site receives a trust score of 0-100, an overall rating level ranging from “High Credibility” to “Proceed with Caution,” and a thorough Nutrition Label report detailing the site’s ownership and financing, content, credibility practices, transparency practices, and history.

NewsGuard is for personal use only. Any commercial, research, or other non-personal use of NewsGuard is strictly prohibited by our Terms of Service: https://www.newsguardtech.com/terms-of-service/

The NewsGuard app for Android uses the Accessibility API so that the app can display NewsGuard warnings when a user is browsing low-rated sites. The user must manually enable the NewsGuard service to be able to view the NewsGuard warnings. The service may be disabled at any time from the device's settings app.

Ratings and reviews

It requires a subscription of about 3 USD. It's not too expensive, but the app's financial model could probably be better. Instead, use ads in a small section of it and have a way to remove them with a subscription. The subscription could also include some advanced tools where as the free version would just have the basic functionality. Most of the app's criticism seems to be this.

Reason for 1 ⭐. I was not able to to next step at the very beginning. There's no option to set up an account via my private email. It's even more important for me not to use Apple, Google or Facebook especially if I decide to pay for it. So fix this glitch and I would be delighted to subscribe and once I'm satisfied with what NewsGuard claims it does, rating may go up.

On the site they say there is a two weeks trial period and then you decide if buying a subscriptions. When you install this app you realize you have to give your credit card number before starting the two weeks trial period. I don't think this behavior to be acceptable. I should be given the two weeks trial period and only then, if I decide it's worth, I give you my card details and buy a subscription. Why should I give my card details to someone I don't know?