Available for Google Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge, NewsGuard relies on a team of journalists who analyze more than 5,800 news websites in the US, each of which is evaluated and ranked on nine different criteria:

• Does the site repeatedly publish false content?

• Does it gather and present information responsibly?

• Does it regularly correct or clarify errors?

• Does it handle the difference between news and opinion responsibly?

• Does it avoid deceptive headlines?

• Does it disclose ownership and financing about itself?

• Does it clearly label advertising?

• Does it reveal who’s in charge, including possible conflicts of interest?

• Does it provide information about content creators?

Each criteria is given a certain weighting, or number of points, to determine the site’s overall rating. A site earns a green rating if it meets basic standards of accuracy and accountability. A red rating means it fails to meet those minimum standards.

After NewsGuard is activated, an icon for the plug-in appears on your browser’s toolbar. Surf to a website that NewsGuard’s team has analyzed, and the icon turns green or red, depending on the site’s ranking. Click the icon to find out why the site earned its stripes. Clicking the link to view the full nutrition label serves up greater details that reveal the ownership, content, history, background, and credibility (or lack thereof) of the site. The label also lists the authors behind the report and the sources they used.

Run a Google or Bing search, and NewsGuard displays its icon next to any news sites or stories that appear in the results. Hover over the icon to view NewsGuard’s analysis of the site.

NewsGuard offers a free two-week trial, after which it’s $2.95 per month.

Designed for Chrome and Microsoft Edge, TrustedNews aims to ascertain the objectivity of a new article you find online. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, this extension analyzes the text on a web page and serves up a score for the article based on a scale from 1 to 5.

1 – Most sentences in the article seem subjective, meaning based more on personal views than established truths.

2 – The style of text seems more subjective than objective.

3 – It’s unclear whether the article is subjective or objective.

4 – The style seems more objective than subjective.

5 – Most sentences in the article seem objective.

Scroll through an article after viewing the score. Any sentences or phrases that factored into the score are highlighted in yellow so you can see the specific text that caught the attention of the AI. TrustedNews also ranks the overall news site with a percentage measuring the level of objectivity. For the next steps, the people behind TrustedNews are looking to alert people to articles that contain misinformation about COVID-19 and flag articles on such factors as racism, sexism, clickbait, political bias, toxicity, and propaganda.

Instead of analyzing entire websites, FakerFact looks at individual articles and stories. Designed for Firefox, Chrome, and Edge, it feeds the text of an article to an artificial intelligence algorithm that the developers named Walt.

By learning the relationships between words and using neural networks, Walt determines whether the intent of an analyzed article is to provide facts or provoke emotions. Further, FakerFact elicits feedback from users on whether they think an article sounds like journalism or not, and that feedback is then fed to Walt to fine-tune its analysis.

To use FakerFact, open an article on a news or opinion website and click the toolbar icon. FakerFact analyzes the article and then delivers a reaction on whether it thinks an article is opinion, sensational, journalism, wiki, satire, or agenda driven.

Click View on fakerfact.org, and Walt explains the reason behind its analysis of the article and tells you if it thinks that reading other articles on the subject might be better if you just want to get the facts.