Inspiration
News and Politicians often say incorrect statements in their articles or speeches spreading unwarranted anger and fear in the general public. This chrome extension is an attempt to prevent such factual inconsistencies.
What it does
The chrome extension goes through the contents of the webpage and matches it with keywords collected from Politifact. If there is a match, it displays a popup regarding the article informing the user if there is something factually incorrect on the page.
How we built it
We first built a web scraper in Python to scrap Politifact.com and then proceeded to setup the chrome extension to parse through the entire webpage. We also used regex to remove all punctuations and stop words to get back only a list of keywords.
Challenges we ran into
- Chrome's security settings for extensions
- Client-side Javascript
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Creating an extension that informs people about the truth and prevents their actions from being misguided by incorrect news.
What we learned
Building chrome extensions Web Scraping
What's next for Fact Checker
- Populate a larger database for the extension by adding more factual sources.
- Make the Fact Checker faster
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