Fact Check Bot

Are you tired of seeing fake news in your social media feed or even in your WhatsApp chats? **Enter Fact Check Bot** Verify the claims made in the message before sharing and help reduce fake news.

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Inspiration

So we had been receiving several messages, especially during the lockdown, containing misinformation and fake news, including but not limited to home remedies, conspiracy theories, and fake advisories. We knew something had to be done soon, else people might hurt themselves or their loved-ones trying remedies like this or spread fake news unknowingly. What better than making it easy for people to verify the facts and make an informed decision?

What it does

Fact Check Bot can help you verify if the information in the message is true or not. All you have to do is trigger the bot with keywords from the claim you want to verify and it will provide you with links to the webpages which have reviewed the claim and provided a rating.

How we built it

Facebook has one of the largest userbases so we used Messenger integration to make the bot available to a large audience. Node.js is used for the backend, Wit.AI is used for the natural language processing capabilities of the bot, and Glitch is used for hosting the backend for the bot.

Challenges we ran into

First of all, both of us stay in different timezones and the difference wasn't negligible. We live 8500 miles apart and hence had a time difference of 12:30 hours. This was one of the biggest challenges as one of us had to stay up late or wake up early to collaborate.

Apart from this, it was challenging to find a source of truth for the bot and integrate it as most of them didn't provide APIs or proper documentation. Building a web scrapper meant overheads and increased processing time. Caching all the data and storing it in a database on your own wasn't a practical solution as well. Finding a trustworthy source and integrating it with the messenger bot, while maintaining user privacy was one of the challenges we spent a few days brainstorming about.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Helping the community identifying fake news.
  • Building a bot that can understand natural language and doesn't give errors just because I had my caps lock on or I didn't write exactly what the application was expecting.
  • The bot can be available to the entire world, irrespective of their choice of device, and the users can get a native experience instead of using a web browser.

What we learned

  • How to build a bot.
  • How to build NLP models using Wit.AI
  • Best practices for hiding API Keys in the production environment & most important, GitHub.
  • Learning new technology isn't that complicated. Where there's a will, there's a way.

What's next for Fact Check Bot

  • Add support for various other languages so people can have a better experience in their native language.
  • Add other sources of truth.
  • Include other fantastic features available for the Messenger platform to improve the user experience.
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