Cofact: a crowd sourcing fake news buster

Fake news is everywhere and it's impossible to ask the professional fact checkers to check all of them. Cofact democratized fact checking and let the audiences decided which opinions are true.

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Inspiration

We're bored receiving dubious messages and need to fact-check every one of them to find out that the sender of the original message have already moved on to spread the other messages, and the professional fact-checkers were too busy to fact-check for us.

It's time to democratize fact-checking with cofact where everyone can give opinions about any dubious messages, and share this through cofact. Even better, we can do this on Facebook Messenger.

What it does

User can submit dubious message through Facebook Messenger. The bot will check whether the message matched any dubious messages on Cofact. If matched, user can choose via Message Templates to see other Cofact users' opinions about that message, and make decision.

How I built it

We use node.js hosted on Firebase.

Challenges I ran into

The language. The current Cofact database were in Thai, and we have to make some of them support English, well, non-native speakers, you know.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Our team were on the full time job, and the main developer can pull this off during the national long weekend. ❤️

What I learned

Designing user experience for the bot is not difficult, but not easy.

What's next for Cofact: a crowd sourcing fake news buster

Cofact bot is still rough edge and need to improve on English localization. We plan to

  • Improve the user experience on Cofact and the bot
  • English L10n

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