Students develop Chrome extension for verifying fake news content

Nabanita De and her team who developed the Chrome extension that should help users filter out fake news from Facebook.  Image Nabanita De

If realizing that one has been unwittingly spreading fake news is annoying to say the least, imagine the headache that Facebook has right now. Thankfully for the public, a group of students have created a “bandaid solution” to the fake news problem.

During an ironically partly Facebook-sponsored hackathon at Princeton University, four students managed to create a Chrome browser extension that would help in filtering out fake news. They called it “FiB: Stop living a lie,” reports SFGATE.

The students involved are University of Massachusetts at Amherst 2nd year master’s student for computer science Nabanita De, Purdue University freshman Anant Goel, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign sophomores Mark Craft and Qinglin Chen.

De explained the News Feed authenticity checker to SFGATE:

“It classifies every post, be it pictures (Twitter snapshots), adult content pictures, fake links, malware links, fake news links as verified or non-verified using artificial intelligence.

“For links, we take into account the website’s reputation, also query it against malware and phishing websites database and also take the content, search it on Google/Bing, retrieve searches with high confidence and summarize that link and show to the user. For pictures like Twitter snapshots, we convert the image to text, use the usernames mentioned in the tweet, to get all tweets of the user and check if current tweet was ever posted by the user.”

The Chrome plug-in will then add a little tag on the upper right corner that says whether the story is not verified or verified.

This extension was released as an open-source project by the students, which means that anyone with the know-how and interest may tweak it for improvements. The extension is available now at the Chrome web store.  Alfred Bayle