The rise of misinformation, biased reporting, and fake news has made it more difficult for any monitoring solution provider, from media intelligence to risk intelligence platforms, to deliver accurate insights. With 90% of the content available on the internet expected to be produced with the help of AI in 2025, sorting fact from fiction has become a critical challenge with far-reaching implications.
At Webz, we are committed to equipping our customers with reliable and transparent data that powers accurate insights. That’s why we’re introducing the Trust Category into our News API offering. The Trust Category is set to include classifications that help your solution differentiate between reliable and unreliable content and sources.
The first two trust categories we are rolling out are:
- Fake News Sites (trust.category:”fake_news”): Sources flagged as deliberately spreading false or misleading information. These include sites that have been repeatedly identified by independent fact-checkers for publishing fabricated news stories or deceptive content designed to mislead audiences.
- Satirical News Sites (trust.category:”satirical_news”): Websites known for publishing parody or satirical content that mimics traditional news formats but is intended for entertainment rather than factual reporting. Examples include The Onion and The Babylon Bee.
This is just the beginning. We plan to expand the trust.category field with additional tags to further support solution providers in assessing content reliability.
What’s new?
Our trust.category field is a new classification mechanism designed to help customers filter content based on trustworthiness. With this first set of tags, you can either include or exclude specific categories, tailoring their data streams to meet their needs.
For example:
- Want to analyze the impact of fake news? Include trust.category:”fake_news” in your API queries.
- Need to remove satire from your media monitoring? Exclude trust.category:”satirical_news” to ensure your data remains focused on factual reporting.
- Reduce false positives in risk intelligence workflows? By filtering out sources tagged as fake or satirical, security teams can minimize irrelevant alerts and focus on real threats, improving the efficiency of their risk assessment processes.
By integrating this functionality, we provide more control and transparency over the data your solution relies on to generate accurate insights.
Why this matters for risk and media intelligence gathering
Our customers serve a range of industries, each with unique challenges in navigating misinformation and biased reporting. Here’s how they’ve told us they plan to use these new trust category tags:
Risk intelligence software providers
By filtering out unreliable sources, risk intelligence solutions can detect and verify threats faster, minimizing misinformation-driven alerts, and reduce false positives, enabling their customers to focus on real risks to their business.
Media intelligence software companies
Separating factual reporting from misleading or fake content helps media intelligence solutions provide a comprehensive view of the discussions around brands, competitors and market trends – whether they are organic or agenda-driven.
Financial monitoring software providers
Markets react to news in real time. Filtering out fake or satirical sources ensures that financial forecasting platforms and trading algorithms are generating insights that are based on accurate information, reducing risk and improving predictive modeling.
How to get started
For existing customers
You can immediately start using the new Trust Tags by adding the trust.category filter to your API queries. We also invite you to discuss with our team which sources are included in these categories – and why. You can also check our documentation for implementation details.
Not a customer yet?
If you’re looking for data you can trust to drive reliable insights, get in touch with us for a demo. Our dedicated data expert team is ready to help you get started and optimize our data for your specific use case.
The introduction of Trust Tags marks a significant step in our mission to help intelligence solution providers get the data they need to deliver reliable insights, amid the growing threat of misinformation, biased reporting, and fake news – at scale. Stay tuned as we expand our trust.category field with more classifications in the coming months!