NewsCheck

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Inspiration

The ongoing political divergence in the United States has resulted in some people reading news sources that they don't even know could potentially be misleading. This is scary, and our group wanted to create something that notifies users about this potential bias in an easy to understand way.

What it does

Our Google Chrome Extension reads the url of the current website the user is on and then checks scrubbed data from MediaBias Fact Check for reliability and bias ratings. It then displays this information in a easy to comprehend way to the user as a badge on their extension bar. If the user wishes to get more information, they can click on the badge for recommendations for other News Sources from different political leanings.

How we built it

We built this extension using predominantly JavaScript with help from Google's Google Extension Framework. We all additionally used VS Code and git to collaborate effectively.

Challenges we ran into

None of us had any experience making Google Extensions or, any sort of Web Development experience; so, our group had to learn a lot of the basics of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and git in order to get our final product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

When we first came up with our idea, we weren't sure if we knew enough to produce what our idea for our final product was; however, we learned enough to implement almost all of the features we initially conceived. Being able to learn enough to produce something that could potentially help people in such a short amount of time was our greatest accomplishment this weekend.

What we learned

We learned a lot about working in a group, keeping code organized, and ideating effectively. It was also extremely useful to have an opportunity to apply information that we have been learning in school.

What's next for NewsCheck

Next, we are going to get our extension published on the Google Chrome Extension Store. Also, as we learn more about JavaScript and web development, we would like to add more features to this extension such as a more efficient website scraper, a more polished GUI, and potentially some sort of AI to better recommend other news sources. Additionally, we are aware of a few minor bugs that may prevent the badge from updating on some news sources, so we plan on fixing those as soon as possible.