Review by Firefox user 6772518
Rated 5 out of 5
by Firefox user 6772518, 5 years agoAn excellent adjunct to fact-checking news stories by providing evaluation of media sources' "trustworthiness." NewsGuard's operational of definition of trustworthiness is based on nine criteria, with each site evaluated given a full "report card" based on each of those criteria. A summary evaluation is also arrived at, but the individual evaluations are key. The extension has worked fine for me. My main disappointment is NewsGuard's recent announcement that it plans to start charging for access to its evaluations, which have been free until now.
UPDATE 17 Mar 2020: I noticed a surprising number of extreme reviews for NewsGuard, so I scanned the "5s" and "1s" to get a better sense of what was going on. The 5s seem like a typical mix of vague, highly specific, and everything in between. The 1s seem to fll into three groups: 1) disappointment in the extension changing from free to subscription-based (a disappointing fact I noted in my original review); 2) general disappointment that some sites were given better or poorer evaluations than the reviewer felt was justified; and 3) non-specific negative reviews that reasonably may have been posted solely to lower NewsGuard's credibility as a source for evaluating the quality of news websites. This wreaks of an anti-NewsGuard campaign—perhaps started by sites that received negative ratings.
Obviously, I cannot prove whether there is/was a campaign to disparage NewsGuard, but I encourage those who are considering installing the NewsGuard extension to read a core sample of the reviews with 1-star ratings and decide for yourselves. If you are considering paying monthly for this kind of service, which many people can hardly afford, at least get a sense of how reliable the negative NewsGuard reviews seem to be before you decide.
UPDATE 17 Mar 2020: I noticed a surprising number of extreme reviews for NewsGuard, so I scanned the "5s" and "1s" to get a better sense of what was going on. The 5s seem like a typical mix of vague, highly specific, and everything in between. The 1s seem to fll into three groups: 1) disappointment in the extension changing from free to subscription-based (a disappointing fact I noted in my original review); 2) general disappointment that some sites were given better or poorer evaluations than the reviewer felt was justified; and 3) non-specific negative reviews that reasonably may have been posted solely to lower NewsGuard's credibility as a source for evaluating the quality of news websites. This wreaks of an anti-NewsGuard campaign—perhaps started by sites that received negative ratings.
Obviously, I cannot prove whether there is/was a campaign to disparage NewsGuard, but I encourage those who are considering installing the NewsGuard extension to read a core sample of the reviews with 1-star ratings and decide for yourselves. If you are considering paying monthly for this kind of service, which many people can hardly afford, at least get a sense of how reliable the negative NewsGuard reviews seem to be before you decide.
242 reviews
- Rated 5 out of 5by JuliaD, 3 months agoAn excellent service, well-worth the small monthly fee. It clearly shows the extent to which sites can be trusted, as well as explaining how these decisions are reached.
- Rated 1 out of 5by MisterAlex, 8 months agoExtension does nothing without paying for a subscription.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 17953219, a year agoThis service is not a replacement for critical thinking and due diligence. It provides helpful alerts of some web sites with a history of inaccurate reporting. It is not the biased, Orwellian overlord the negative reviewers would have us believe. And, they are identifying content-farm sites that are using AI to create content/news. This is a very serious problem NewsGuard is tackling.
- Rated 5 out of 5by NT, a year ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by PAUL_D74, a year ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 15237927, 2 years agoThis plugin is great! I hated having to apply critical thought to the news stories I was reading, so exhausting! Now I browse away in safety and comfort, secure in the knowledge that all my thinking is being done for me by professionals! I really hope ReligionGuard is in the works???
- Rated 1 out of 5by SuNin, 2 years agoYou have to pay to use it? That seems ridiculous to me. I don't want to sign up for anything, I'm not interested in your free trial of anything. I just want to know if a site can be trusted and what the rating is and what to watch out for.
If you don't have to pay, you still have to sign up, there doesn't seem to be a way to bypass that screen. I don't need some shady company collecting information on my internet search habits. These guys are a data breach waiting to happen. - Rated 1 out of 5by Paulie, 2 years agoEs kann wohl nicht wahr sein, dass auf der Mozilla Seite ein Add-on angeboten wird, welches konservative und andere nicht willkommene Meinungen aus dem Netz zu verdrängen sucht. Ich traue keinem Faktenchecker, dazu sollte jeder halbwegs intelligenter Mensch selbst in der Lage sein.
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 17839720, 2 years agovermeintlicher Faktenchecker - ein Fall für das Wahrheitsministerium!
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 13782624, 2 years ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Lucky Joestar, 2 years ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 16347626, 2 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Neo.Entreprise, 2 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14704642, 2 years ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Mritz, 2 years ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 13524391, 2 years ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 17455534, 2 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14751204, 3 years ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 12945303, 3 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by par1138, 3 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Tachyth, 3 years ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by franz, 3 years ago