StopFakeNewsSpreading

Involve citizens and authorities in mitigation of fake news spreading on COVID-19. Beauty of the solution is that it involves you and me to be part of a better society.

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Inspiration

Use technology as a tool to stop spreading fake news. People spread the fake news unknowingly. Through this Hackathon, we have brainstormed and built a working prototype to address the problem of fake news spreading and empower every citizen a responsible for the better society.

What it does

Beauty of it is that it involves citizens and authorities to work hand in hand in mitigating the spread of fake news related to COVID19 and in general fake news itself. A chrome web application centrally maintained by the authorities provides so called trustworthiness rating for individual websites. Users can refer to the current rating of the site and use discretion before referring the content to their family and friends. This way citizens are given responsibility of building communities based on facts. If a person finds the content fake, he/she has the possibility to report it to authorities as fake website. Similarly individuals can also rate the website as fact if they are sure of the content presented in the website currently browsed. This way we involve citizens and authorities in mitigation of fake news spread on COVID-19.

How we built it

A web application is built in google chrome. It has access to central database of website URLs and collective rating of individual URLs. A trustworthiness rating (collective rating calculated based on authorities rating and rating from individual citizens) is calculated and displayed next to the webpage in real time for citizens to take informed decisions about the content they browse in the website is a fact or fake!

Challenges we ran into

Integration of backend server with the frontend of the chrome extension was difficult. Creating a pitch video instead of live pitching was also a challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • A simple but a powerful idea which empower citizens to build a better society
  • Implementation of a working prototype within 2 days
  • Collaborating virtually among the developers
  • Protecting vulnerable groups which get affected by the spread of fake news

What we learned

Building a chrome extension and its integration with Firebase as backend.

What's next for StopFakeNewsSpreading

  • Participatory disaster response strategies in public-authorities partnerships
  • Social scores for responsible citizens
  • Work with responsible Government authorities to create actual rating of websites
  • Reach out to more number of official authorities to perform validating activity
  • Integrate with AI models which will automatically scan official websites and update the rating
  • Helping authorities to narrow down sources of fake news creators
  • Build a community of fact gate keepers who can navigate others, people who we can trust
  • Empower every citizen to fight ConfirmationBias
  • Extension to social media applications like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp etc

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