[2] It is a consortium of news companies working collectively to develop and implement transparency standards that for users can see and machines can read in order to increase accountability in journalism.
[9] The consortium "has created a set of digital standards called "Trust Indicators" to help identify and surface high quality reporting from reliable news sites.
[7] Following its November 2017 launch, Facebook, Google and Twitter, also began to deploy the new trust indicator symbols to "help assure users of the reliability of their content and combat fabricated stories".
"[15] Business Wire compared the Project's Trust Indicators to nutritional labels that consortium partners can use to "provide clarity on who and what is behind a news story so that people can easily assess whether it comes from a credible source.
"[20] In the Knight Commission's 2019 report "Crisis in Democracy: Renewing Trust in America", the authors note that "[w]hile many news organizations have experimented with transparency initiatives, there are no standard best practices recognized across the industry."
They recommended that U.S. news media leaders and an ongoing working group of experts from across the industry could identify and adopt common standards and best practices that promote transparency" by building on "newer efforts underway such as the Trust Project" among others.