LemonInk
What We Used
Chrome Extension in use
Credible!
Fake!
Improvements
Future Vision

LemonInk

In today's age, technology has become so instant that we wake up to news, through Social Media Apps, Messaging Platforms, and Websites. We have news 24/7, compared to our parents when they were young who could only access the news through their daily newspaper. The amount of news that we consume has increased dramatically. A disadvantage of this is misinformation spreads like wildfire. Sometimes our grandparents share bizarre articles and take them as 100% fact. Rumours are spread easily through social media with mass posts, and now in this age of artificial intelligence, deep fakes are becoming harder to detect.

That’s why our team came up with LemonInk🍋, a Chrome extension which assists users in detecting fake news.

LemonInk's front end consists of HTML/CSS/Javascript and the back end consists of Flask and Python with the integration of Machine Learning. Since our team is new to machine learning we followed a tutorial from SimpliLearn to train two models to detect fake news. To do this, we used two data sets with true and fake news. We merged these two datasets and defined training and testing data using a 75/25 split. We trained two models: a logistic regression model, and a decision tree classifier, and then tested the accuracy of the models which came out to 98.6% and 99.6%. Then we defined a function to check a string input using the models.

Although we were able to create the Chrome extension front end, we could not combine our backend, web scraping and machine learning into our application. This was due to web scraping issues and difficulties taking the URL of the current page because of Chrome's Security Policy.

We hope to in the future fully merge the backend into the application, incorporate deep fake detection, make our application platform agnostic, and have detection of all content including videos, social media, and websites.

Creating this project was fun and a great learning opportunity, and we hope to create more in the future!

From Team Lemonsmashers