Facebook fake news: Chrome extension FiB helps overcome the latest threat to credible news

Facebook finds itself in the news, yet again, for the wrong reasons. This time, it’s for fake news. Whether you believe it or not, fake news is a problem. Unfortunately, with no concrete solution so far. Four innovative students have managed to put together a solution that’s been appreciated and may go a long way in helping Facebook, and several other social media services, search engines and eventually users deal with the menace of fake news proliferating online. The Washington Post now reveals that a team of four students named Nabanita De, Anant Goel, Qinglin Chen and Mark Craft turned out to be the winning team at the Princeton University when given the challenge to solve fake news issue that has been hounding Facebook. The algorithm by these students helped distinguish between fake and real news, and interestingly they put it together in just 36 hours. The system built by the winning team is called FiB and it’s a Chrome extension that tags links on Facebook as verified or not. This process of tagging depends upon several external factors such as credibility of the source and cross-referencing. “Where a post appears to be false, the plug-in will provide a summary of more credible information on the topic online,” the report explains. These students have now released it as an  open-source project, and have asked if those with development knowledge could help improve it. The hackathon was sponsored by Facebook along with other leading tech companies, and FiB managed to bag the best moonshot award by Google too. However, the report adds, Facebook or Google haven’t really reached out to these students in order to help them, in spite of both facing similar issues . While Facebook has said it will work at curbing the fake news problem, Google also promised to bring new policy to restrict ads on fake news websites.