Internet giants such as Facebook Inc. and Google LLC have come under fire over the last year the untrustworthy news that gets circulated on their platforms, but now the two companies and several others are joining a new initiative from The Trust Project aimed at helping users spot sketchy sources using “trust indicators.”

Trust indicators are meant to give users more information about the source of an article, including who wrote it and the organization that published it.

Facebook, Google, Twitter Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Bing have all agreed to use the new trust indicator system on their platforms, but so far only Facebook appears to have actually implemented the system. Starting today, Facebook will display trust indicators as an icon in News Feed that will provide more information about a publisher. Facebook first began testing a similar feature in October, but the new button will use the Trust Project’s data on publishers.

“We believe that helping people access this important contextual information can help them evaluate if articles are from a publisher they trust, and if the story itself is credible,” said Facebook Product Manager Andrew Anker. “This step is part of our larger efforts to combat false news and misinformation on Facebook — providing people with more context to help them make more informed decisions, advance news literacy and education, and working to reinforce indicators of publisher integrity on our platform.”

Google says its next step is to “figure out how to display these trust indicators next to articles that may appear on Google News, Google Search, and other Google products where news can be found.”

Here are the eight indicators currently available according to a blog post by Jeff Chang, group product manager of search at Google:

• Best Practices: Who funds the news outlet and their mission, plus an outlet’s commitments to ethics, diverse voices, accuracy, making corrections and other standards.
• Author Expertise: Details about the journalists, including their expertise and other stories they have worked on.
• Type of Work: Labels to distinguish opinion, analysis, and advertiser or sponsored content from news reports.
• Citations and References: For investigative or in-depth stories, access to the sources behind the facts and assertions in a news story.
• Methods: For in-depth stories, information about why reporters chose to pursue a story and how they went about the process.
• Locally Sourced: Lets people know that the story has local roots, origin or expertise.
• Diverse Voices: A newsroom’s efforts to bring in diverse perspectives.
• Actionable Feedback: A newsroom’s efforts to engage the public in setting coverage priorities, contributing to the reporting process and ensuring accuracy.

The indicators use data from an opt-in program operated by the Trust Project, where news organizations can register and enter their ethics policies. The Trust Project said it has signed on 75 major news organizations for trust indicators, including among others The Economist, The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail. The organization said it expects to add other publishers and partners.

Photo: The Trust Project