A team of college students has developed a fake news recognition browser extension. This browser extension will alert users about the fake and biased news stories and helps guide them to more balanced coverage. This student's team is getting attention from Internet companies and Congress after developing this browser extension.
They named it 'Open Mind', was developed earlier this month during a 36-hour problem-solving competition known as hackathon at Yale University. The team comprises of four students - Michael Lopez-Brau and Stefan Uddenberg, both doctoral students in Yale's psychology department; Alex Cui, an undergraduate who studies machine learning at the California Institute of Technology; and Jeff An, who studies computer science at the University of Waterloo and business at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario.
The team's software, designed as an extension for Google's Chrome browser, will display a warning screen when someone enters a site known to disseminate fake news. It also will alert a reader if a story shared on social media is fake or biased.
The plug-in uses existing sentiment analysis technology to analyse any story that might appear in a newsfeed, identifying the major players and any political slant. It then can suggest to the reader other stories on the same topic that have an alternate viewpoint.
This browser extension is more than just alerting app, as it also collects browsing data and shows a graph which indicates whether they have been reading stories from just one side of a political spectrum.
The idea, said Lopez-Brau, is to help get people out of the habit of associating on social media only with people who share their viewpoints and reading biased news coverage skewed toward their beliefs.
The team won the chance to meeting the members of Congress this spring as a prize for winning the challenge.
Facebook is one of the sponsonrs of Yale's hackathon, is also seems to be interested in talking to the students as part of its ongoing work to solve the same problem, said Ruchika Budhraja, a Facebook spokeswoman.
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