Programmers step up
Post-election, things have finally started to change. Nabanita De attended a hackathon at Princeton University and, with three fellow programmers, developed an algorithm that authenticates what is real and what is fake on Facebook. They call this tool FiB.
This algorithm soon turned into a Google Chrome Extension that scans through your Facebook feed, in real time, and this is what I found on their website.
Our algorithm is twofold, as follows:
Content-consumption: Our chrome-extension goes through your Facebook feed in real time as you browse it and verifies the authenticity of posts. These posts can be status updates, images or links. Our back-end AI checks the facts within these posts and verifies them using image recognition, keyword extraction, and source verification and a twitter search to verify if a screenshot of a twitter update posted is authentic. The posts then are visually tagged on the top right corner in accordance with their trust score. If a post is found to be false, the AI tries to find the truth and shows it to you.
Content-creation: Each time a user posts/shares content, our chat bot uses a webhook to get a call. This chat bot then uses the same backend AI as content consumption to determine if the new post by the user contains any unverified information. If so, the user is notified and can choose to either take it down or let it exist.
https://devpost.com/software/fib
Fake news is everywhere. Should the tech world help stop the spread?
Why such a high tech solution? It should be as simple as creating a “gray list” of websites that publish fake news. A way to flag or vote for websites as being “fake” should be a really way to manage this. Also let users opt in/out of seeing the fake news, that way everyone is happy? What do you think?