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  The logo for the project.

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  The sidebar.

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  This is what the API looks like when its working

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  The settings menu where you can customize the color of the background.

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  A pretty self explanitory button.

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  A note

The idea

Misinformation Asssistan was inspired by Facebook. When we saw the blatant lies being spread, we knew we had to do something. Fact check websites already exist but, as of yet, there has been no effective browser integration for fact-checking for firefox.

How it helps

Misinformation assistant does a variety of things to help combat misinformation. First of all, it allows you to take and save notes on anything on the web. This can be useful for those who are marking things down for later. The biggest thing that Misinformation assistant does to mitigate lies and deceit is to provide integration with snopes.com, a popular fact-checking website.

What it is

Misinformation assistant is a firefox and soon to be chrome extension built using web technologies such as javascript, HTML, and CSS.

Problems we ran into

Snopes.com is annoying and doesn't provide an API to get information on specific facts, so multiple members of our team spent hours writing a web scraping script to get information from the website. Unfortunately, Snopes was still annoying, and locked down their site data, making it too difficult to get the information from their website. Fortunately, a third party had a data analytics API that would return information from Snopes that we could then adapt for our own purposes.

What we learned

We learned how to develop web extensions better, this was due to many challenges coming our way. We grew our critical thinking skills greatly as well. Also, we learned how to work better as a team. Our team learned the importance of communication as these events are very short. Lastly, we learned the importance of time management and delegation. This culminated in a project our team is very proud of and hope to support in the future.

What's next

The biggest thing that needs to happen is compatibility with chrome. It is very simple to do so as the APIs are almost the same. After that, we will probably work on improving the user interface due to it being rather unpleasant to look at as of right now.

Built With

• algolia
• css
• html
• indexeddb
• javascript
• web
• web-scraping