A couple of days ago we reported that a Chrome extension had been developed that could weed out fake Facebook news. The only “problem” with that extension is that it relies on a list that is manually curated, meaning that if the list isn’t updated and more fake news websites pop up that aren’t on the list, they will slip by the extension’s detection.
To be fair the developer did claim that he threw it all together in 1 hour, but now it seems that with a little bit more time, a group of students – Anant Goel, Nabanita De, Qinglin Chen and Mark Craft – put together a more complex version of the extension during a 36 hour hackathon at Princeton University.
Their version differs from the previous one as their uses an algorithm to help distinguish between real news and fake news. Dubbed “FiB”, it has the ability to tag links posted on Facebook as either being “verified” or “not verified”. What is taken into account is the source’s credibility as well as cross-referencing with other news sources.
The best part is that the students have since made their algorithm open source, meaning that other developers, like those at Facebook, are free to use it for their own purposes and also to improve on it. If you’d like to get your hands on it, hit up the Chrome Web Store for the download.