The Trust.txt system has quietly helped a network of media publishers establish mutual trust by their association with other reliable publishers since 2018. The system fosters collaboration between news organizations and state press associations and can help search engines distinguish trustworthy news from misinformation or disinformation.

Until now, the system — which received early funding from the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) — has largely operated behind the scenes as an internal industry tool rather than a public-facing resource, limiting its utility for readers trying to find their way through a chaotic mass of information coming from all directions and all platforms all the time. Now, a new browser extension can detect the trust.txt files that indicate a news website is trustworthy and bestow the website with a publicly visible badge, much like the icons browsers use to indicate websites are sufficiently secure.

Scott Yates, founder of Trust.txt and JournalList — the latter its network of about 3,000 participating publishers, already far more than the 110 it sported in 2022 — said the value of the system and its badge comes from its crowdsourced approach to trust.

“This isn’t like Google providing a badge that says Google approves of this Google transaction,” Yates said. “This is saying, ‘someone else trusts me, and you can trust that it’s true because of this badge.’”

The badge and browser extension were made possible by the work of Christian Paquin, a Microsoft engineer who had been working on an unrelated “origin of content framework” that similarly allowed people to list content they created or approved of. Upon learning of Trust.txt, he helped modify the system to not only verify that websites were part of a trusted network of news organizations but to extend that capability to associated social media pages, essentially creating an automated auditing system combined with the informative, public-facing utility of something like linktr.ee.

Former CableLabs CEO and JournalList board member Ralph Brown then built on this work to craft the browser extension.

Paquin said the current capabilities are only a taste of what the system could become if it gains wider use in the news industry.

“Early adopters can use the extension, but down the line, browsers themselves could do that work,” Paquin said. “And even further down the line, platforms themselves could do that and browsers wouldn’t have to do anything.”

He echoed Yates’ view that while other tools exist to help organizations verify their own data, the ability for a third party to verify the trustworthiness of a website is breaking new ground.

“These are pretty new ideas that need to be sold to a broader set of stakeholders to gain momentum,” Paquin added.

As a member of JournalList’s board of directors, Randy Picht — executive director of RJI — sees that goal of broadening the system’s reach as a natural fit with RJI’s mission of fostering innovation in local news.

“Local, community-centered news is a haven of trust for an increasingly skeptical public,” Picht said. “Trust.txt is an opportunity to build on that foundation and give news consumers a convenient way to navigate the confusing information landscape.”

Another part of that effort involves AdZou, the full-service marketing and advertising agency operated by strategic communication students at the Missouri School of Journalism. AdZou has taken on Trust.txt as its client for the current semester and is developing strategies for raising the system’s public profile among news organizations and the wider public.

Half the work, of course, is already done. While Trust.txt is still working to build its following, the problems it is addressing could hardly be more well known.

“The work we did was very much a reaction to these types of questions about knowing who to trust in the age of AI,” Paquin said. “You can authenticate content and say, OK, that’s an authentic video — it’s not a deepfake. But we didn’t see anything about accounts. Is an account on X or Youtube really that person’s account?”

With the launch of Trust.txt’s browser extension, the answer from Yates and JournalList is a resounding yes.

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Cite this article

Fitzgerald, Austin (2024, Feb. 21). Trust.txt launches browser extension, making verification of trusted news sources easier for publishers and audiences alike. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/trust-txt-launches-browser-extension-making-verification-of-trusted-news-sources-easier-for-publishers-and-audiences-alike/