It turns out that fact-checker “credibility” ratings don’t affect people’s views of news much

Nor should it:

Labeling the credibility of information sources does not shift the consumption of news away from low-quality sources or reduce belief in widely circulated inaccurate claims among average internet users, but providing an indicator of sources’ quality may improve the news diet quality of the heaviest consumers of misinformation, shows a new study by New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics.

Notably, the researchers also found that a majority of people rely on credible sources of information, with two-thirds completely avoiding unreliable news sites.

The study, which appears in the journal Science Advances, centered on credibility ratings determined by NewsGuard, a browser extension that rates news and other information sites in order to guide users in assessing the trustworthiness of the content they come across online.

New York University, “Does presenting credibility labels of journalistic sources affect news consumption? New study finds limited effects” at Phys.org (May 6, 2022)

It’s actually just the first stage of censorship.

When nonsense news is really a problem, there are better ways to deal with it.

The paper is open access.

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