Business Insider has published an article discussing the recent debacle involving Facebook and the fake-news problem that has been talked about at length surrounding the recent election.
From what the article points out, a couple of U of I students were involved in creating a Chrome extension that solved the issue with fake-news getting circulated throughout the social media platform.
Check it out:
During a hackathon at Princeton University, four college students created one in the form of a Chrome browser extension in just 36 hours. They named their project “FiB: Stop living a lie.”
The students are Nabanita De, a second-year master’s student in computer science student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Anant Goel, a freshman at Purdue University; Mark Craft, a sophomore at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Qinglin Chen, a sophomore also at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Their News Feed authenticity checker works like this, De tells us:
“It classifies every post, be it pictures (Twitter snapshots), adult content pictures, fake links, malware links, fake news links as verified or non-verified using artificial intelligence.
“For links, we take into account the website’s reputation, also query it against malware and phishing websites database and also take the content, search it on Google/Bing, retrieve searches with high confidence and summarize that link and show to the user. For pictures like Twitter snapshots, we convert the image to text, use the usernames mentioned in the tweet, to get all tweets of the user and check if current tweet was ever posted by the user.”
The browser plug-in then adds a little tag in the corner that says whether the story is verified.
