Dunnock

Inspiration

It can be hard to find vetted and trustworthy information on the internet. There are many fact checking sites out there, but it can be quite a burden to manually search for a claim everywhere you see it on the internet. We wanted to make this information easy and seamless to find. We wanted to make it easy for our users to educate themselves on avoiding disinformation, which is an important social issue.

What it does

Dunnock reads through the search results and creates a list of all the URLs it finds in your results. It then cross-references this with a hardcoded list of websites that have been fact-checked independently and found to peddle misinformation.

How we built it

We built a Chrome extension that adds a disinformation badge to sites and articles with verified false or misleading claims.

Challenges we ran into

Out of our group of four, only one of us had any sort of extensive experience with JavaScript and Web Extension development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although we had struggles, we went from a majority of our group having zero experience with the technologies to having a mostly working final product.

What we learned

Pretty much the entirety of our code was a brand new concept to the majority of our group. We learned how to use JavaScript, and how to work with the Chrome Extension API's.

What's next for Dunnock

The first step is that we will come back when we have had some sleep and take a fresh look at the issue that has held our product back from a full working prototype. We are very close... and think that with a fresh perspective and that the issue is minor enough that with our renewed energy we can resolve it with ease.

We had ideas for additional functionality that we did not have time to add, that would help provide some context for why a site or claim is misleading and a way for the user to learn more about it.