Facebook Plugin Could Change the Way You Read News

Facebook Plugin Could Change the Way You Read News stocksnap.io De, a student at the University of Massachusetts, attended a hackathon at Princeton University this week. The prompt? Develop a technology project in a time period of 36 hours. She also suggested that her teammates build an algorithm that would authenticate real vs fake on Facebook. And she and her team did it. De, Anant Goel (Purdue University), Mark Craft and Qinglin Chen (University of Illinois) created an extension in a Chrome browser that will tag links in Facebook with “verified” or “not verified.” This is done by considering factors such as “the source’s credibility and cross-checking the content with other news stories.” And if a link isn’t verified? The plugin also provides a summary of credible information on the same topic, to help clarify what the actual news is. And of course, it has a fantastic name: FiB. And because the students are still in school and only had a little over a day to create this plugin, they’ve released this as an “open-source project.” This means that it can be improved by anyone with the experience to do so. And the plugin is available for the masses, but they can’t meet the high demand on their own. So FiB isn’t currently up and running for everyone to use. But the idea is there, and the content is sure to follow quickly, especially with this type of demand. According to Goel, the idea is that Facebook would eventually work with third-party developers to manage news articles on the site themselves. The Princeton hackathon was sponsored by Facebook, as well as other tech vendors, but hasn’t reported reaching out to FiB to help in any way. Same goes for Google, who has been having the same problems. However, both companies have stated that they are going to “take steps” to fix the problem at hand. But the problem is a big one, and it’s only getting worse for the time being. According to BuzzFeed News, over 100 sites made up pro-Trump content (which was traced to Macedonia). In a Washington Post interview of Paul Horner, a fake-news creator, he stated, “I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything they’ll post everything, believe anything.” And Melissa Zimdars, professor at Merrimack College in MA, also says she’s seen this problem when her students go to site references for essays. She made the following list, which has gone viral, as a warning to students looking at fake news sites: •Watch out if known/reputable news sites are not also reporting on the story. Sometimes lack of coverage is the result of corporate media bias and other factors, but there should typically be more than one source reporting on a topic or event. •If the story makes you REALLY ANGRY it’s probably a good idea to keep reading about the topic via other sources to make sure the story you read wasn’t purposefully trying to make you angry (with potentially misleading or false information) in order to generate shares and ad revenue. She also stated that it doesn’t help when news media uses click-bait headlines and that it’s nearly impossible to distinguish these from fake stories. There’s also the issue of whether or not people even know they’re sharing fake links. According to Paul Mihailidis, teacher at Emerson College: “I don’t think a lot of people didn’t know; I think they didn’t care. They saw it as a way to advocate. The more they could spread rumors, or could advocate for their value system or candidate, that took precedent over them not knowing. A large portion of them didn’t stop to critique the information. One of the things that has happened is people are scrolling through [Facebook] and the notion of deep reading is being replaced by deep monitoring. They see a catchy headline, and the default is to share.” However, this isn’t the only problem. There’s also the fact that people scrolling through their news feed on a social media site aren’t necessarily looking to fact-check, which means they aren’t looking up stories to verify whether or not they’re true. So in this way, the plugin is a perfect solution. According to De: “A few days back, I read an article telling people they can drill a jack in the iPhone7 and have an earphone plug, and people started doing it and ruining their phones. We know we can search on Google and research it, but if you have five minutes and you’re just scrolling through Facebook, you don’t have time to go verify it.”