It’s really not a surprise that fake news being shared on Facebook is common. Some links look straight up sketchy. Some are really convincing. Some play into your inherent biases. But fake is fake, and while people propagate lies, it may be up to technology and algorithms to set things in order.
In a report by Business Insider, a tool that verifies links on Facebook has been created as a browser extension by a group of college students during a Princeton hackathon. Anant Goel, Nabanita De, Catherine Craft and Mark Craft, called the project “FiB: Stop living a lie.”
“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,” De tells Business Insider. “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 extension has been tested out to much success, and the whole extension was uploaded online for anyone to tinker with and download. When are you going to put this up, Facebook?
Photos from Business Insider and Lava.nl
Comments