Claim Your Agency

Giving people control over when and where they consume their news on social media, such that they are empowered and not intimidated to make change.

Comment

Our team noted an increasing correlation between the amount of time we spent aimlessly scrolling through pandemic-related news and a deterioration in our mental health. Particularly on social media, we have very little control over the kinds of information we are exposed to and thus our mindset is likely to be impacted. We believe this effect deters people from seeking meaningful change by denying individuals a sense of agency. We thus came up with Claim Your Agency: a chrome browser extension that uses simple regex matching as well as NLP to filter out pandemic-related news on Facebook that might negatively impact your mental health. These posts are saved in your browser, independent of Facebook (such that they are preserved in the event of a deletion). Users can then view the saved posts on their terms by clicking the 'visit Post' button on the extension until they have exhausted the store of saved posts. Hopefully this extension will give people a sense of agency over the global situation and aid in the mental health crisis that pervades through our age group.

Challenges we ran into

Filtering out Facebook news stories in light of the (intentionally obscure, adblock-outsmarting) redesign! Learning how to use chrome APIs to communicate between sensitive DOM information and our extension, navigation Google's security policies along the way

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our NLP prediction model Successfully filtering out and saving news stories

What's next for Bad News Filter

Responsive UI and support for multiple browsers (non-mac users)

Share this project:

Updates