In the wake of the presidential election there’s been growing concern about fake news stories. Now, a UMass Amherst student has helped develop a plug-in that determines whether a story is true or not.
A few days after the election, Nabanita De, a computer science student working on her masters, took part in a fast-paced competition at Princeton University called a “hackathon.” De joined forces with three other students and they developed a Google Chrome plug-in that can be used on Facebook called “FiB.”
“As you scroll through Facebook,” De explained, “it would tag your posts as verified or non-verified based on whether it has fake content. If it is not verified, it will show the user the verified content.”
The algorithm takes key words from a fake news article and searches for other links on the same topic and delivers a fact-based summary.
De and her colleagues made the plug-in open-source, available for anyone to use or improve. Within five days, at least 50,000 people had checked it out.