Inspiration

The rise of technology has led to a new increased wave of fake news and misinformation. Are you tired of people calling climate change a hoax? Or the opinions of those with power constantly dominating the mainstream media narrative? We certainly were. Although the popularity of video-sharing platforms like YouTube provide endless information and entertainment from just a few clicks away, its rise in popularity also makes it close to impossible to ensure validity for all the videos it provides. This job was now placed on each individual user and we wanted to help make that process of fact-checking smoother. Because misinformation holds society back, but YouTruth makes You discover the Truth so that we all can create a better and more equitable world.

What it does

YouTruth is a comprehensive AI-powered fact-checking platform that analyzes multiple content types for accuracy and credibility. Users can input:

YouTube Videos: Automatically extracts transcripts and analyzes factual claims
Article URLs: Scrapes and fact-checks web content from news sites, blogs, and academic articles
Plain Text: Direct analysis of any written content
Images: Uses GPT-4o Vision to extract and verify text/claims from screenshots, memes, and documents For each input, YouTruth provides:
Line-by-line factual accuracy breakdown
Overall accuracy percentage and confidence score
Content type classification (informational, entertainment, satire, opinion)
Detailed claims analysis with evidence and corrections
Red flag identification for bias, manipulation, or misinformation
Actionable recommendations for viewers

How we built it

Backend: Python with FastAPI providing a robust REST API with comprehensive error handling and CORS support Frontend: ReactJS with TypeScript, featuring:

Responsive design with light/dark theme support
Real-time progress indicators with smooth animations
Framer Motion for polished UI interactions
Tailwind CSS for consistent styling AI Pipeline:
YouTube transcript extraction via youtube-transcript-api
Web scraping with BeautifulSoup and Mozilla Reader API fallback
Multi-stage content processing with regex cleaning and normalization
OpenAI GPT-4o-mini for content analysis and fact-checking
GPT-4o Vision for multimodal image analysis Key Technical Features:
Intelligent content type detection and adaptive analysis
Character encoding handling for international content
Progress tracking across all analysis types
Session history with localStorage persistence

Challenges we ran into

API Reliability: Making the YouTube transcription -> Analysis workflow consistently handle edge cases like timeouts, encoding issues, and context window limits
Prompt Engineering: Crafting system prompts that reliably produce structured JSON responses while maintaining analysis quality across different content types
Real-time Progress: Implementing smooth progress indicators that accurately reflect backend processing stages
Theme Consistency: Ensuring all UI components properly switch between light and dark modes using conditional styling
Content Extraction: Building robust web scraping that works across different website structures while handling character encoding issues

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're incredibly proud of delivering a polished, production-ready application that successfully combines aesthetics with functionality. YouTruth features a clean, intuitive interface with smooth animations and professional design, while maintaining robust backend performance. The app handles multiple content types seamlessly, provides detailed analysis with high accuracy, and offers a delightful user experience with features like dark mode, session history, and real-time progress tracking. Most importantly, we created a tool that genuinely helps users navigate the complex landscape of online information.

What we learned

This project taught us invaluable lessons about teamwork and effective task distribution. We successfully allocated team members to different specializations - some focused on backend development, some on UI/UX design, some on our pitch and slide deck, and others on system integration and testing. This division of labor allowed us to work in parallel efficiently while maintaining code quality through regular integration and testing. We learned how to coordinate complex features across the full stack, from AI prompt engineering to responsive design, and how to make technical trade-offs under time constraints while preserving user experience.

What's next for YouTruth

Our immediate roadmap focuses on fixing final bugs, optimizing performance with faster AI models, and preparing for production deployment. Future enhancements include:

Enhanced Analysis: More sophisticated bias detection and source verification
Performance Optimization: Caching mechanisms and faster AI model integration
Deploying on Cloudflare Pages or similar (and use Workers for backend).
User Features: Account system, analysis history, and sharing capabilities
Mobile Experience: React Native app development
Real-time Alerts: Browser extension for on-the-fly fact-checking