Facebook’s fake news problem fixed by 4 students in 36 hours

Facebook has recently received a lot of flak for circulating fake or uncredible news on the social media website. The content allegedly helped Donald Trump win the 58th US Presidential Elections by curbing public sentiment.  

Facing criticism, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had promised to deal with the issue at hand. Now, a group of four students may have come up with the solution to Facebook’s fake news problem.

According to the Washington post, four students -- Nabanita De (from University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Anant Goel (from Purdue University), Qinglin Chen and Mark Craft (from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) -- have developed a Chrome extension called FiB which can differentiate between fake and real news.

What makes the endeavor even more incredible is that the algorithm was developed in only 36 hours for the Princeton University hackathon challenge to stop fake news on Facebook.

The FiB Chrome extension has an algorithm built into it which can identify legitimate news. The extension allows used to tag a news feed as “verified” or “not verified”.  

While analysing an article, the algorithm takes into account a number of factors like credibility of the source and cross-references news articles with others

If FiB classifies an article as fake, then it will provide a number of legitimate stories and even the link to the original source. The algorithm is currently available as an extension on Chrome Web Store and the developers have open-sourced the software so that other programmers can improve the application.