In recent years, using online intermediaries such as social media, news aggregators, and search engines to access and read news online has become increasingly common, while direct access to news publishers has become less important. However, a global survey showed that 62 percent of online news consumers believe that they’ve seen misinformation online weekly. Indeed, social media platforms’ propensity to reward the sharing of engaging content without regard to whether or not it is factual has created a digital environment rife with misleading and false information. As users chase virality, misinformation gets amplified on these platforms and fact-checkers cannot keep up. By the time this content can be fact-checked, it will have already gotten its maximum engagement.

What can be done to ensure that high-quality, independent journalism—instead of misinformation and clickbait—can still attract public attention when news dissemination is increasingly mediated by digital platforms? Several groups are now trying to solve this challenge by developing and promoting digital markers, akin to nutrition labels, that signify reliability and credibility of news online.

The stakes are high. Online misinformation and disinformation are polluting public discourse in countries around the world and posing a fundamental challenge to democratic politics and social stability. But any effort to combat false information and propaganda must also strike a balance with the right to freedom of expression. This balancing act can be especially delicate in countries where governments use the threat of false information as a pretense to exercise greater control over the information space and attack independent, critical journalism.

Throughout history, journalism has set itself apart from other types of content by adhering to rigorous professional codes of ethics. Editor guilds, journalist associations, and media councils, among other self-regulatory bodies, have long emphasized this adherence, giving journalism a distinct identity. Such codes can be found published in various forms. They vary from country to country, but generally converge around commonly held journalistic norms such as transparency, accountability, quality, and editorial independence.

Such codes of ethics, however, have become increasingly irrelevant in a digitally mediated news environment. Social media algorithms remain almost entirely agnostic to content quality, partly because “engagement” translates into profitability and because platforms have eschewed editorial liability. While governments and regulators mull over how to work with social media and search engines to provide diverse, trustworthy news to the public, the media industry is attempting to address the problem from within through digital news trust initiatives—a digital solution to a digital problem.

These news trust initiatives refer to online tools that provide standards and indicators, developed for and by journalists and news organizations, that identify, categorize, and label news organizations based on those standards. “Trust” is the key word in these initiatives. Readers, platforms, advertisers, and news outlets must trust that these initiatives can fairly distinguish news from other content online. At the same time, trust is often vaguely defined and open to subjective interpretations, making it difficult to assess and benchmark. The task is fraught with challenges that news trust initiatives are aiming to solve. Many of these initiatives are relatively new, and largely untested in emerging democracies. But proponents of the approach claim that, if they get it right, they can simultaneously strengthen revenues for news outlets by drawing audiences to trustworthy journalism, and improve the health of digital news ecosystems by identifying false information online.