So we know that recently there is a lot of fuss surrounding the publishing of news that are deemed to be fake. Google and Facebook have gotten a lot of flack especially considering that some believe that somehow the fake news allowed President-Elect Donald Trump to get where he is today, but that’s a debate for another day.Fake news is a problem and while Facebook has their work cut out for them, there is now a Chrome extension dubbed the “B.S. Detector” that will help identify news articles posted on Facebook that might be fake. Created by Daniel Sieradski, it seems that it only took him an hour to piece together.
In a post on Product Hunt, Sieradski wrote, “I built this in about an hour yesterday after reading [Mark Zuckerberg’s] BS about not being able to flag fake news sites. Of course you can. It just takes having a spine to call out nonsense. This is just a proof of concept at this point, but it works well enough.”
Note that the extension doesn’t rely on fancy algorithms or machine learning, but rather it is based off a list of well-known hoax websites. The list can be changed and users can submit requests to modify those settings on Github. It’s probably not the most efficient way, but for now we guess it does the job just fine. You will be able to get your hands on it via the Chrome Web Store.