I’m calling attention to this issue because of the most recent and alarming case of misinformation on Brave Browser news, but I have noticed biased and dubious sources roaming free on Brave’s news page for a while now. Today’s incident was The Gateway Pundit, a proven right-wing conspiracy site that filed for bankruptcy in bad faith to avoid misinformation lawsuits, highlighted on my browser home page. I didn’t have the news page open, so this article was meant solely to draw the user’s attention. While the unprompted highlighting of the article makes the incident worse, Brave Browser pushing The Gateway Pundit is highly irresponsible regardless of whether or not I was already looking at the news.
This also is not the only instance of blatantly false, or at least questionable news being highlighted or disproportionately featured by Brave. When I first noticed the Brave news section I tried to utilize it a few times, but many of the articles came from The Daily Beast, Rawstory, or the HuffPost. I quickly stopped using Brave’s news feature as these sources’ credibility and bias issues make them poor candidates for being introduced to a story. MediaBiasFactCheck rates The Daily Beast and HuffPost as “mixed” in credibility and both sites are considered to have a left bias by the three major news trackers (mediabiasfactcheck, ad fontes, allsides). Rawstory is considered “strong left” by Ad Fontes and was busted by PolitiFact for posting a “half true” article on a Georgia bill in 2015. Yasha Levine’s SHAME Project extensively documents the Huffington Post AKA HuffPost’s corruption and misinformation (particularly alarming is their history of bogus medical advice) both in individual articles and on Arianna Huffington’s SHAME profile.
We already live in a dangerous time for misinformation and algorithmic radicalization. Pushing clickbait-y shock-value headlines from sources such as these is not only irresponsible but sinister. You should not allow conspiracy sites to run rampant on your news page, and at minimum users should be able to flag misinformation sites in a way that other users can see. When The Gateway Pundit popped up for me, I had no way to do this. I could only ask that Brave not show me their articles anymore. Excluding the articles from my own feed does not help the wellness of our information community as a whole. You need to have safeguards in place against misinformation if you’re going to integrate a news page into your browser. Otherwise, the radicalization and misled beliefs of individuals who use your browser is on you.