Inspiration
In the age of social media and Trump, misinformation spreads faster than a wildfire and has a far-reaching impact. This “fake news” detriments public health, social order, political progress and scarily, the very foundations of democracy. The internet is by far the greatest tool available to educate people across the world, but now we’re realising its negative potential: misinformation spreads miseducation, and this has a jarring impact on our society.
What it does
Veritas is a program that evaluates the credibility of written news and articles based on a number of key criteria, providing readers with a score out of 100 for the legitimacy of information provided, as well as suggestions for other potential sources (be they more accurate, or more up to date). Veritas is able to analyse the content of the article itself as well as relevant metadata to educate readers about the legitimacy of their information. Articles given a high score are further collated and organised on the Veritas website, which serves as a repository for accurate and reputable news and information.
How we built it
For front end development, React/NextJS was used. On the backend we required two main processes: database management and storage was done using Mongo DB NoSQL, while NodeJS was used for all other processes.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into a few roadblocks when using the APIs, with particular difficulty connecting external services with with the server. Creating a chrome extension was also novel to us, and we had to adapt to the limitations of this process.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Creating a functional chrome extension
What we learned
Working with various APIs in this scenario was difficult but provided a great learning experience. Another new experience was working with machine learning training, which also proved a challenge but something that was extremely interesting.
What's next for Veritas
Our platform relies on the collection of large amounts of data that we can put through our detailed algorithm for analysis Gaining a large platform of users not only fulfils our purpose of helping users identify misinformation and stopping it’s spread, but also allows us to evaluate a larger number of articles and add to our database, hopefully making VERITAS a continually evolving and increasingly precise platform thanks to the machine learning components.
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