Ask HN: Chrome extension to verify credibility of articles | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Chrome extension to verify credibility of articles

6 pointscphoover7 comments

Is there any chrome extensions that can verify the credibility of an article, by checking for multiple sources, or checking against a black list of fake news sites, and providing a non-partisan credibility rating. Does something like this exist? If not would anyone like to help build such a project?

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Coincidentally I just read an article about the idea being implemented during a Hackathon at Princeton very recently [0]. Four students put together a very intelligent AI in 36 (!!) hours to verify articles posted on FB for truth, using the term AI lightly of course. They've also open sourced their project since then [1]. Obligatory chrome extension link [2].

[0] - http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/It-...

[1] - https://github.com/anantdgoel/HackPrincetonF16

[2] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fib/ofpheinlpjdffp...

Sorry for being snarky but you mean like a Chrome extension that does your thinking for you?

Such a tool might end up doing a disservice. People arguably already don't think enough about the stuff that's presented to them as facts. I'm not sure outsourcing critical thinking to machines would really help in that respect.

As for the technical aspects, checking multiple sources helps little with regards to the veracity of an article. Many news sites just regurgitate news from other sources or remix previous articles.

I've thought about doing something like this, but my thought was a website first and then going into the extension realm.

If interested, I can help with the back-end. Fullish-er stack person with a few things living in production today (one of which does 500k uniques/month). Ruby/Rails is my go-to. Email is in profile.

Not that I know of, it's a hard problem, perhaps look at this very recent discussion of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12970820 ?

"This article is fine, move along citizen, nothing to question here."

Who checks the checkers?

How would something like this work? Would there be keywords you input into the extension? etc

You can easily search the chrome web store btw

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