Microsoft is Fighting Fake News? Hilarious (Premium)

I was amused to see that Microsoft has quietly undertaken a campaign to warn Edge mobile users about untrustworthy news sites. After all, Microsoft is one of many news aggregators that promotes fake news all the time.

No, I don’t mean earth-shattering fake news, like Russia allegedly colluding with the winner of the most recent U.S. presidential election: I have no proof of that. I’m talking about something far more personal in nature, something I see every day. Something I can easily point to.

As you must know, content creators big and small are struggling to make ends meet in the wake of the online ad implosion. Here at Thurrott.com, we created Thurrott Premium as a direct and honest way to make up for disappearing ad revenues. But other sites try other strategies. You’ll seen the pretend stories about “saving x% on a ‘learn Microsoft Office now’ bundle,” and similar. And you’ve seen the sites that mix fake stories in between real stories that are just about you buying something on Amazon.com or some other site so they can make an affiliate commission.

(I’m not above the occasional affiliate link for sure, but if you’re curious, I can tell you that my affiliate income, such as it is, fell by over 50 percent in 2018 because I just can’t be bothered to do this unless it’s truly a great deal. I don’t feel that purposefully mining readers for extra money is necessarily a great approach.)

No matter your feeling about these pretend articles, I think we can all agree that they have no place in news aggregation apps and services. That is, if you use Apple News, Google News, Microsoft News, or any other news aggregator, you should just see news. I know, radical.

But you don’t just see news, and that’s true even—perhaps especially—in Apple News, which is widely promoted as being human curated. That’s bullshit: I see pretend articles that are really just about some blog’s affiliate income every single day. It’s all over the technology coverage in Apple News.

Anyway, Microsoft’s efforts to warn Edge mobile users about untrustworthy news sites is well-intentioned. I won’t make fun of Edge because it has incredibly low usage share, on both desktop and mobile. But I will point out the futility of making this effort in a browser than no one uses. Especially when Microsoft has its own news service and app that could surely benefit from this level of oversight.

To see what I mean, open Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 and look at the default New Tab page, which consists of real news and outright nonsense. Right in the top, most visible part of the page is a rotating widget of news stories. And ads like this one.

Come on.

Yes, it’s marked as an ad, but subtly. More to the point, there are similar ads all over this New Tab page, and not just in that carousel. It’s a mish-mash of real and fake news. In fact, using the criteria Microsoft punished The Daily Mail with, I can only conclude that Microsoft would need to warn users about its own site: “this website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” Anyone who’s viewed the Edge New Tab page would agree to this.

UPDATE: Microsoft takes exception to my comment above that it is “punishing” The Daily Mail, noting that the NewsGuard functionality in Edge mobile is made by a third-party and that customers need to enable this functionality first. My take on this is that the firm is responsible for any feature that ships in its own product. But here’s a quote from a Microsoft spokesperson about Edge mobile and NewsGuard.

“Microsoft is partnering with NewsGuard to offer … a feature in the Microsoft Edge mobile apps for iOS and Android to help our customers evaluate news sources. NewsGuard is optional and customers need to take action if they want to use the feature.”

No, it’s not just Microsoft.

Google News and especially Apple News are both terrible when it comes to weeding out fake news. Here are two examples today in Google News.

And Google is reportedly working to end support for ad-blocking add-in in its Chrome web browser. Because, again, Google is all about advertising.

But if you think back to my recent editorial about Microsoft needing to promote privacy about all else, what I was really talking about was trust. This is something that comes up a lot with the big tech firms, and while most are decidedly untrustworthy, I feel that Microsoft has an opportunity to rise above it all. And just be better. Well, it starts at home. And it’s unclear why anyone would trust Microsoft and its products if what they see every morning is that terrible New Tab page.

So, yes, let’s all congratulate Microsoft for its work against fake news. But let’s also fairly criticize them for promoting it as well. And hope that it will see the error of its ways.