Fake News on Facebook and The Power of FiB
Recently there has been talk from Facebook’s millions of users about fake news circulating on its newsfeed. Stories revolving around the deaths of famous celebrities such as Clint Eastwood or Jaden Smith as well as the typical Matt Damon Explains Why He’s Moving to Ithaca, New York are not just outrageous but can be downright annoying for those who rely on social media as their only news source.
Fortunately, four college students have tackled on a moonshot project that will help authenticate news articles and media alike on your Facebook feed through a Chrome extension coined FiB. The neat functionality of FiB is its backend use of an AI algorithm that can decipher fact from opinion and has the capability of establishing a “trust factor” by cross-listing an article’s content with other article’s of greater merit. In addition, the implementation of FiB’s trust factor has underlying components of Google’s PageRank algorithm. FiB is able to “[take] into account factors such as the source’s credibility,” which can be done with PageRank — a topic relative to our discussion in lecture concerning web browsing.
If you would like to read more about this great project, click here.
If you would like to help contribute to the project, which was made open-source, click here.