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Ratings Dialogue
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Preliminary User Flow
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FakeCheck

Our Inspiration

We live in an era that has made it possible to spread information at such a high rate that is almost instantaneous. This drastic improvement in technology in recent decades has given almost everyone access to a vast amount of information. Although this is beneficial in many ways, such as people being able to voice their issue and problems and learning about the world around us, the information available is affected by false claims and fake news which often strike hardest at the non-tech-savvy institutions that speak to our history, and the organizations working hard to just make the world a better place. The dangers of widespread misinformation among social media and networks can be easily seen during the current pandemic. For example, Ofcom has found that almost half of UK online adults came across fake news about coronavirus at the beginning of April. Misinformation among our current situation can put peoples’ lives at risk.

Aside from the risks caused by misinformation about COVID-19, many political issues have also been negatively affected by fake news. News and media continue to increasingly polarize situations to increase the disparity between various groups with every major event, revolution, or social-impact movement.

We need to provide a platform for the truth to spread. This problem is global, and so we must think big.

Problems with current solutions

Academic Issues: Current fake news detectors or rating agencies make use of a few academic scholars with special expertise in their respective areas of study. The high volume of misinformation cannot be processed by these to give a rating. Although you may get a deep analysis of an article or post on social media, you won't have this review done quickly, it won't appeal to the average person, and this method is limited by the physical hours fact-checkers can work.

Cultural & Race-Based Disparities: The fact is that most fact-checking sites are English-language based only. That means primarily U.S., Canada, and the U.K. based, with support only for those English-speaking communities. People who suffer from the wrath of misinformation, whether it be false health advice, targeted propaganda, or plain frauds often do so in countries where English is not spoken. Therefore, they do not have the privilege of being able to check the validity of their own media in real-time.

Our Solution

Click here for our fully deployed platform to identify fake news

FakeCheck is rating platform built to provide equal access for the truth on the web. With this service, we want to increase the amount of media and news that is fact-checked. This platform will also increase global access to fact-checked news by allowing people with various cultural backgrounds and geographical location to fact check their local media. We hope to achieve these goals with a simple and elegant solution that is FakeCheck.

The Process

The process starts when the users want to find a rating through the truth.

Users have a piece of media they want to check a rating for its reliability or contribute themselves with a rating.
They go to our site and intuitively paste their link into our engine, which is the most prominent feature on our homepage.
If prior crowd-sourced ratings exist, the user immediately sees our curated and published ratings for that media, based on our users' input and proof as shown below.

In the ratings viewing the page, we offer the following pertinent information.
- Our published average user ratings.
- Information regarding the source such as publisher, type of source, title, and a link to the source itself.
- The top three countries where the majority of the ratings have been collected from.
- Ability to share and save this source.
- Your rating if having given any, ratings from other users showing the two most voted ratings at the alongside our published rating.
- A rating trend timeline to let the user know how the rating for this specific source has changed over time.
We prompt the user, if they have the aptitude, to rate the media as well, as long as they have insight that may work in support of the media, or equally, against its truth-fullness, we respect their voice and let them share it. We process their queries and build and internal score we wish to publish.

The user will be able to click the "RATE THIS SOURCE" button to contribute the knowledge they have.

The rating dialogue asks the user the following key questions to determine the truthfulness of this source:
- Does this source contain any false claims? If so, how many?
- How knowledgeable is the author on the topic of this source?
- How strongly did the author support their claims with evidence?
  
  The users can answer these questions with the star rating, each star describing a different level to the answer. They can also justify their ratings in the text box below to help other users understand the rating and increase credibility.
Once our confidence metrics are met, we update a newly published rating for the media We will constantly adapt to make use of the effort and insight of the user-base to republish.
We alert any watchers, or users who gave ratings of newly published updates by us, so they are constantly in the know, and can rely on being kept in the light instead of the dark, on the news, regardless of where they may come from.

We notify users on trending topics, changes to the sources they have rated or updated them on any upvotes or downvotes to their rating.
We provide organizations with insight, based on alerts happening around the world related to fake news detection or negative sentiments and classified to their names to show their brand is recognized by users across the world, helping them improve and adapt.

Our goal is to use this platform to serve the world with a responsive, honest fact-checking platform that is intuitive and easy for everyone to understand regardless of their background. Alongside the public, cultural organizations will also be able to use this platform to share their voices to educate everyone, and above all, maintain and strengthen their online image and awareness.

The Overall Process Flow on Our Site

Process Diagram

Sub-Flow 1: User Entry to the Site

user-1

Sub-Flow 2: Key Actions Taken to Rate or Upvote/Downvote Media

user-2

Sub-Flow 3: Providing Support to Help Grow Our Platform

user-3

We have used and hope to use various APIs offered by AWS to create and optimize our platform.

API Management: API Gateway
Storage Management: AWS S3
Keyword Searches: AWS Elastic Search
Database SQL Management: Amazon RDS for SQL Server
Inappropriate Image/Content Recognizer: Amazon Rekognition
Amazon CloudFront

These services allow us to accomplish various tasks to make our platform ready to be released to the public all over the world.

We make income for development and growth by serving personalized ads based on users' tastes in the news - something that is incredibly powerful, as well as charging for-profit businesses to gain value-multiplying insight from our platform on how their brands and banners are perceived.

The Competition & Our Judging Criteria

Future of FakeCheck

As the amount of information online increases, it becomes exponentially difficult to fact them all. We hope to use the prizes to help our platform develop a reach a wide range of audience. As something that is so under-implemented among the tech and news society today, this concept has the potential to strike rapid growth in the rating space for media, and help mitigate the issues caused by fake news, by empowering the individual user to check their media easily.

What Winning This Competition Means to Us

We worked on and developed this project with the following goals in mind:

Creation of quality idea to help people: Coming up with a viable idea to fix any issue is the key to a successful project. We created with this platform with the intent to provide a simple and elegant solution for people in need of truth and education. Our goal is to improve our idea to better fit the challenges that are ahead of us.

Making an impact: Coming up with a viable idea to fix any issue is the key to a successful project. We created with this platform with the intent to provide a simple and elegant solution for people in need of truth and education. Our goal is to improve our idea to better fit the challenges that are ahead of us.

Laser-focus on implementation and development of the platform: The implementation of an idea is as important as the idea itself. Due to this fact, we created a platform that is well thought out keeping the user in mind. To make the process simple as possible for the user means a wider reach of audience to our fact-checking site.

Excellent user experience and user interface: We are striving for excellence and working to create a better user experience. A well-polished design like ours will increase users ability to easily navigate and use our platform.