As tech giants figure out how to keep users from engaging with fake and misleading news online, a new Gallup poll suggests one potentially effective approach. In the survey, which was commissioned by journalism startup NewsGuard and its investor, the Knight Foundation, more than 60 percent of respondents said they were less likely to share stories from sites that were clearly labeled as unreliable. They were also more likely to trust stories from websites marked as credible.

NewsGuard was founded by media executives Steve Brill and Gordon Crovitz to do just that. The company, which launched last summer, has developed credibility ratings for more than 2,000 of the web's most popular sites, using a team of journalists to vet each site based on a set list of criteria. Its browser extension affixes a red icon to websites that fail its test and a green icon to ones that pass. Users can also see a full "nutrition label" explaining each rating.

The extension has been live for months, but this survey is the first evidence of how people might respond to its ratings in the wild. The question was: Would users find NewsGuard itself to be trustworthy? Or would it face the same accusations of partisan bias that have dogged social media companies like Facebook and Twitter? While it's not a peer-reviewed study, and the topic certainly warrants further inspection, it's an encouraging sign not only for the startup but for anyone seeking remedies for the scourge of misinformation online.

Gallup sent the survey to a representative sample of 25,000 people who installed NewsGuard's browser extension in November and used it for nearly two weeks. Of the 706 people who answered, 79 percent said they would give NewsGuard an overall rating of either excellent or good. More than 50 percent said red ratings made them less likely to read content from a given website, and 63 percent said it made them less likely to share content from those sites. Overall, more than 90 percent of respondents said the nutrition labels were either somewhat or very helpful. Even among people who said they disagreed with at least one rating, that figure still hovered over 80 percent.

There was, of course, a split between Democrats and Republicans. While 87 percent of Democrats rated NewsGuard as good or excellent, just 70 percent of Republicans said the same. (About 42 percent of respondents were Democrats, about 24 percent were Republicans, and about 34 percent were independents, roughly mirroring the electorate as a whole.) That Democrats would view NewsGuard more favorably than Republicans is to be expected given how divided the two parties are on the subject of media trustworthiness in general. An October 2018 Gallup poll found that while 76 percent of Democrats have at least a fair amount of trust in the mass media, just 21 percent of Republicans say the same. That makes NewsGuard's 17-point split look tiny by comparison.

More than 50 percent of respondents said NewsGuard's red ratings made them less likely to read content from a given website.

One important caveat to Gallup's findings: While the initial sample of 25,000 participants was demographically representative of the US, the 706 survey respondents were not. This means, Gallup writes, that the survey results "may not be reflective of attitudes of the broader US adult population," but merely represent a sample of likely NewsGuard users. It's impossible to know whether the people who were least likely to agree with NewsGuard's ratings were also the least likely to complete the survey.

Still, the company’s cofounders are encouraged by the numbers. "We knew in our bones we were being fair," says Brill, who also founded The American Lawyer magazine and Court TV. "But we wanted to see if people who never met us agreed."

When they launched Newsguard, Brill and Crovitz bet that trained journalists could do a better job judging a news outlet's credibility than all of Silicon Valley's algorithms combined. They hired a team of 20 reporters to analyze websites based on criteria like whether the page regularly publishes false content or whether it clearly discloses advertising. If adopted broadly by platforms like Facebook and Google, Brill and Crovitz believe the ratings could help curb the endless spread of fake news.