This may come as good news for all those who have fallen prey to fake news on Facebook. A group of students in the US have come up with a unique algorithm that authenticates what is real and what is fake on Facebook.
The team of students included Nabanita De, an international second-year master’s student at the University of Massachusetts, Anant Goel, a 1st year student at Purdue University, Mark Craft and Qinglin, 2nd year students at the University of Illinois, reports Washington Post.
What have they created?
The group of students have made a Chrome browser extension that tags links in Facebook feeds as verified or not verified after cross checking the content with other news sources.
The plug-in will provide credible information on the topic everytime a post appears to be false.
The extension has been named as FiB and was developed in a day and a half by the students for a hackathon(an event on computer programming) at Princeton University.
It’s Open Source too!
Currently, they’ve released it as an “open-source project,” so that anyone with development experience can work on it to make it a better and improved version of the existing plug-in.
The students are expecting Facebook to team up with FiB as a third-party developer so that all news feed data could be controlled by the company. FiB was awarded “Best Moonshot” by Google.