ReNews

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  Thumbnail #2 (also inspired by real news and fake represented by the colors green and red!).

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  Thumbnail (if you look closely, you will see our Policy is apart of the "newspaper" and that the overall thumbnail is inspired by ReNews!).

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  Quick snip of our backend machine-learning for our website version.

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  A small snip of our Chrome Extension of ReNews on Chrome.

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  A snip of our files we made to make our Chrome Extension.

Inspiration

The world, today, is an advanced world where the dissemination of information is just in the span of fingers. With an ever-growing population using social media and usage of social media for news has led to widespread fake news. According to Pew Research Center, almost 45% of people surveyed found that they come into contact with fake news every day on social media. We built ReNews to help people get real news through verified sources.

What it does

ReNews takes a piece of news that the user feeds into it then, it runs an automatic check to verify that news and informs the user whether it's fake or real. ReNews also recommend users, based on their interests, stories, articles, and/or other information for their reference.

How we built it

We built ReNews out of rigorous research and technology. we utilized machine learning specifically linear and logistic regression in order to determine the efficacy of an article. We first constructed the ML model with python in the Flask framework and deployed it on Heroku. We created a front-end website with ReactJS in which the user could input their article. Later we realized that it would benefit the user experience to have a chrome extension instead, so we built that using the classic HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Challenges we ran into

We are a team of individuals from different countries with different time zones. Therefore, we had to manage timekeeping in view of MST, IST, and PST time zones, and remaining on track with everyone was a big challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of ourselves as a team although we have different national identities, we worked together as a family with the same spirit. We, as a team, made our product come into effect with the desired result.

What we learned

We learned mainly, improving collaboration and time management skills. We also learned how to work on real-time policy problems and at the same time, be calm in times of stressful situations.

What's next for ReNews

This project has been memorable for all of us. It would be a shame not to continue evolving and improving it. Our project is currently based in the US. Due to less time, we were not able to implement it globally. Our next step would be to complete this and improve the minor details to make it an easier experience for the user; an example would be besides getting the text from a story into the product, instead, you get the link and paste it into the website or extension. We would also like to spread our idea through social media, it would be a great platform for educating people and making them aware of our topic and its damaging effects.

Built With

• api
• heroku
• html/css
• javascript
• jupyter
• machine-learning
• python
• react
• repl.it