Inspiration
The internet is plagued with click bait and misinformation. With help of social engineering, notorious publishers are taking advantage of novice users by concocting false stories. We are tired of sifting through articles not knowing what to trust.
What it does
This extension will indicate if the content that you are reading is legitimate or fake. Look for these emoji next to the URL: (thumb up) - Legit (Poo) - Fake (Alien) - Controversial
You can also select a data point on the website, right click and click on "Request Fact check" menu option which will open a new or existing comment thread right within the website. Users will be notified who may choose to respond with links to the source.
How I built it
Used HTML, JS, CSS, Chrome extension APIs, Firebase real-time database and hyphenate to create custom comment threads (aka chat rooms).
Challenges I ran into
Coming up with a universal scoring system to mark an article as fake news in 20 hours was definitely a challenge.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I hope this inspires users to think twice before clicking the share button. We are excited to build a community of fact checkers and investigative journalist who are equally passionate about instilling trust back into the internet.
What I learned
Fake news and publishers are becoming very sophisticated. Some of the publishers are making it extremely hard to scrap content, others have moved from static text content to immersive videos which makes the detection much harder. Hence, we believe that AI and ML will have limited ability to mark news as fake. So humans and machine will once again have to provide the necessary data signals to build a much more accurate & complete system like they did by helping build the visual search index thanks to interesting hacks like Capcha!
What's next for Factcha - Identify fake news & certify content
We hope to launch the extension on Chrome and Firefox by end of the year.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.