Due to the sheer volume of fake news spread on the internet, people are likely to read a fake article at some point, and maybe even believe it. Enough people are believing fake news that it has become a widespread pressing issue.
Legitternaut aims to correct this problem. The website will allow anyone to search for an article and see whether it is likely real or fake news. This decision is crowdsourced so there is not any single person making what can be a very controversial and potentially subjective call. Instead it is the consensus of many people that makes the decision.
Our algorithm takes into account each user's education, occupation, fields of knowledge, and how often they agree with the consensus in order to determine how to weigh their opinion. It also takes into account how popular the article's website is, and how trustworthy other articles on that site are. We believe that this is the best way to verify the legitimacy of articles.
The site runs on a Node.js and Express.js backend with custom CSS and JavaScript styling. Since we were both rookies and had never worked with Node before, we ran into many issues that slowed us down, but we accomplished most of what we wanted to. Initially we had planned on making a Chrome extension to make it easier to check articles and even highlight fake news on Facebook, but there was not enough time, so that could be a future goal. Also, since Legitternaut collects information on what articles people have read and what their interests are, it should be able to recommend articles that users would find interesting.
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