
Ask HN: Is there any accreditation body or credential for online news sites? - elinear
It seems like much of the fake news controversy that surfaced around the election could have been prevented if there was an organization that gave sites credentials verifying that they are legitimate news sources. This way, Facebook and Google (and any aggregator for that matter) could give higher standing to articles from accredited sites and lower to those from sites not accredited. If it doesn&#x27;t exist yet, would such a body end up surfacing from one of the big internet players, or should it be an independent body?
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FeatureRush
We already had similar discussion here in Poland couple years ago. The thing
was: should all on-line news sites be officially registered in similar way as
paper newspapers? Then what about blogs, personal webpages and other sites
that are not strictly news sites but do happen to publish/spread news?
Obviously it went nowhere. It would create a new barrier for a lots of people
trying to simply publish something on the Internet and would not really fix
much. Not to mention that in Poland there are already mechanisms in place to
stop/punish people spreading harmful information, and that laws are not tied
to any specific medium - do you not have those in USA? If the
news/article/comment/etc is untrue then someone can sue, right?

The real problem here is that people put trust in things they should be
skeptic about and the official certification not only doesn't fix it, actually
it could make it worse depending on who is in power...

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kolinko
Registration and accreditation/verification are two different things. In
Poland, the govrnment wanted to register websites, without fact-chekcing afaik

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FeatureRush
You are probably right, it was some time ago, but did they also not wanted
other things that paper publications are required, like storing copy in some
archive?

Anyway, accreditation would make it even more troublesome and still would not
solve the root issue and even if we focus on scenario OP described: FB ranking
the news by trust, there are still many loopholes here. Like publishing true
news with a spin or simply spamming worthless articles "Random Celebrity said
good things about President Candidate" \- just that alone would still do the
trick.

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AjJi
I think the first question to ask is, what is a "legitimate news source"?

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kolinko
I'd love to have a plugin that for every website visited tells me if they
published any rumors that later proved to be incorrect.

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dublinclontarf
So every news website ever.

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brudgers
It exists in many countries.

Governments license news organizations and journalists. Governments review
stories. Governments run the legal print and broadcast media. Governments
regulate access to web sites.

Be careful what you ask for...but consider donating to Poynter:
[http://www.poynter.org/](http://www.poynter.org/)

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RogueX
In my experience, people simply don't care. If the headline is juicy enough
and is something they very much want to be true, they share it and reshare it
on social media without bothering to examine the source, much less the
content. Worse, a lot of these people have a distrust of "mainstream media"
and professional journalists. They seem to have this notion that _all_
journalists are part of some global media conspiracy to just make stuff up
(though no one seems to know what the actual motives are for this supposed
conspiracy), so they trust some dimwit blogging from his mom's basement who
claims he has "inside sources" that no major media organization has. That's
what we're dealing with here in the U.S.

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elinear
My thought is that such a body would act like existing organizations that, for
example, certify medical professionals, engineers, accountants, or even
colleges. For online news it may look like a journalism credential, requiring
sites to follow basic and sound journalistic ethics when publishing. By these
standards it should be easy for the large papers (NYT, WSJ, etc) as well as
your local news and tv to receive accreditation for their sites. See
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accreditation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accreditation)

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aaronhoffman
Can it be decentralized?

What about a browser extension that allows users to "rate" each story/author?

You could follow other users you trust, and get an aggregate of their ratings
so you wouldn't just get the global rating, which could be corrupted.

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collyw
That will just end up like Facebook - an echo chamber.

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Dardania
Possibly by reverting to the newspaper of record?:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record)

