This plugin is an excellent resource for determining the general reliability of a news source..
It should be noted though that the plugin does not claim, nor could it reasonably claim to verifiy any news source as 100% reliable.

One further observation, almost every negative review comes from someone who tried to use this to verify their pre-existing assumptions about a news source, and dismisses the validity of the plugin because it does not confirm their existing presumptions - curiously enough the very target audience most biased sources prefer, imagine that.

Politically motivated and biased newspeak tool. INGSOC would be so proud.

Poor attempt to censor and control information. Do your own research, trust your instinct and don't be told what is unreliable or not by "Newsguard" which tells you to trust sites that flat out lie to you.

Lol, what a joke: CNN, arguably less than stellar in it's reporting get a 100% green rating on all 9 points (avoids deceptive headlines? really??), while FoxNews, also arguably less than stellar, gets 3 red marks for corrections, ownership disclosure and conflicts of interest. What a joke, both "news" and "guard" should be in "air quotes" for this plugin!!!

There is no perfect solution to fake news other than taking personal resposibility for the time and effort requird to verify information. This plugin is simply a tool which can give an indication to how trustworthy a source is likely to be. There are a lot of lazy 1-star reviews from people angry that their most loved or most hated news outlet isn't rated how they want it to be. That is missing the point. I personally disagree with just about everything that is published by the British Tabloid "The Daily Mail" - but it gets a green rating overall and gets 6 out of 9 greens. half of these green ratings are for transparency - for all it's nasty content the mail doesn't hide what it is - it is the rightwing mouthpiece of Viscount Rothermere, a member of the British aristocracy. Whilst the reporting in the daily mail is heavily biased, this is not what newsguard claims to rate.
Furthermore - rather than criticise newsguard for changing the rating for the daily mail from red to green (as they recently did), I admire their openness to change. The mail previously rated less well for openness, probably because when contacted by newsguard originally they weren't forthcoming with the information requested, and deservedly got rated badly for openness. Once the mail made this information available newsguard rightly changed their rating.
I think the most helpful review below is unsurprisingly the most considered one, by concentricbrainwaves. I also agree that having an amber rating would be helpful, and in the case of the daily mail, would probably be appropriate. This is really my only negative - the overall rating is not as useful as it should be and to get genuinely useful ratings you will need to view the details 9-point breakdown. To make the overall rating more useful it should only be possible to get green overall with a higher score than 6/9 - probably 8/9

Diese App ist nicht nur überflüssig, sondern gefährlich.

Überflüssig, weil man dann gelcih auf selbst denken und Internet verzichten kann und den Fernseher mit ZDF oder WDR einschalten kann.

Gefährlich ist es, weil damit die ohnehin schon schlimmen Versuche, eine ideologische Einheitsmeinung durchzusetzen, verstärkt werden (was wohl auch das Ziel ist). Demokratie, Meinungsfreiheit, Kritik an Eliten etc. soll weitgehend unterbunden, Alternativen aus dem Gesichtskreis verbannt werden.

Ein Beweis ist, dass Mainstreammedien natürlich als korrekt bewertet werden, selbst wenn krasse und offensichtliche Fake News verbreitet werden.

This plugin looks great! On the other hand, I'm probably not in the target audience, because I've so far been surprised by exactly none of its rankings. I really appreciate the fact that NewsGuard is taking this on, and I'm hoping that more people start using it.

EDIT: I've read a whole bunch of the one-star reviews, and most of them seem to be angry, but most of them are angry about green labels for sites that display bias. I think it's important to note that bias is almost entirely irrelevant to the goal of NewsGuard. NewsGuard doesn't tell you whether sites are biased, just whether they're telling you the truth. This is why Fox news and CNN both get green labels: you may not agree with which stories they choose to carry, but they both generally adhere to accepted standards of journalism: tell the truth, and admit it when you get something wrong.

I checked many sites with this and it is very bias and untruthful. Perfect example they give Buzzfeed perfect green checks across the boar, Buzzfeed is a joke but they rate it perfect. Also CNN has perfect green across the board. CNN has had some miss steps lately should not be perfect green. Fox news got a few red x's and ok but CNN should be about equal to that as they are as far left as fox news is right.

Ranks Daily Mail as a reputable source. Useless.

the fact that this outfit changed its rating for the Daily Mail from Red to Green shows that its not immune from political pressure . the location of NY to be the judge of what is and isnt fake and the globalist bias of the journalists who are deciding on our behalf what is and is not fake news cannot be trusted . it is a very serious matter when powerful agencies decide to guide the public and manipulate their opinion . to be frank I would ONLY potentially trust websites that have a red marking on them . they would alos probbaly be fake news but certainly no news site that has been given a Green rating by the gremlins at Microsoftwould ever qualify , basically this is a censorship tool of zero value to any independent truth seeker

This extension gets four stars, for now.
Most of this accolade is for the idea and some of it is an encouragement to further development into a truly impartial algorithmic guide (insofar as this is possible).
I think the red-and-green categorisations are a little too black-and-white and likely to be controversial (because, increasingly, almost nobody among the general population reads "the news" without some acquired bias). Perhaps *White* should mean "so far as can be detected this site is trying to get it right" and *Amber* should mean "there is some doubt about the veracity of some items on this site" with, in both cases, a link to more detail. A third colour (Blue?) would be useful to indicate news aggregators with a legend along the lines of "This is a news aggregation site. Please check source articles on the originating sites".
Finally, it is disappointing that a particular print-and-online "news" publication recently had it's rating changed from "Red" to "Green" without changing its editorial stance in any way. To my mind "Red" was thoroughly deserved because the publication presents opinion as if it were fact and habitually spins news to such a degree that it winds up seeming to mean the opposite of the original facts. Others will disagree with me on that assessment but independently verifiable "facts" are "the news" which the reader should interpret whereas "opinion" is someone else's (often malicious and politically motivated) interpretation. When opinion is dressed up as the news it is *fake news*; when a fact is twisted it becomes a lie. If, under the colour scheme suggested above, the publication in question were to be marked "amber" (with straight-forward explanation) - No Red, No Green, - NewsGuard's rating would be less likely to seem biased, even to some of the One-Star Generals who, in this comment space, have denigrated this nascent attempt to differentiate information from disinformation.

This widget requires massive amounts of work. Classifying news sources as "outright 100% true" and "outright 100% false" with their green/red mark label system is not the right way to do things.

They have very complete "Nutrition Labels" which allow for more complex ways to classify sites, so why don't they use them?

This can work but not for the time being. I highly discourage anyone from trying to get source guidance out of this widget in it's current state.

Based on the forementioned Nutrition Labels, they clearly have plenty of information on the sites they rate. All they have to do is use them more openly and make them simpler for a user to understand, instead of just putting them side to side and saying "This is great", "This is terrible".

Thank you for creating this add-on. It will reduce misinformation. DO NOT listen to those who are giving this add-on 1 star.

This addon had a lot more 1-star reviews than it currently does. They have presumably been removed at the request of NewsGuard.

The reasons why I would urge people to avoid this add-on:

1. Serious privacy problem: sends the sites you visit to NewsGuard's servers - there's no reason why this addon cannot work without such reporting.

2. The people involved with this addon (see their advisory board and read the reporting that's been done on them) are, I'd argue, not the people who should be entrusted with deciding what is/isn't a reliable source of news.

3. A site which refuses to participate in this scheme will get flagged as unreliable (see what happened to Boing Boing when they were approached)

4. Mozilla/Firefox co-founder Brendan Eich has commented on this company: "This is a bad operation all around"

wow, they deleted so many 1-star reviews. Seems like a desperate move.

Minor newspapers or independent journalists are hampered by this extension.

It is harmful. And it aims to discredit other relevant sources.