Fake news on Facebook: B.S. Detector is a new Chrome extension to identify stories without credibility

While Facebook is under the radar for carrying fake news and somehow having an effect on the U.S. presidential election, a new Chrome extension has been launched to take care of the issue. Called as B.S. Detector, this Chrome extension claims to identify and flag news that seems to be fake.The new project was released on Tuesday and can identify articles on Facebook that seem to be from a questionable source. When a user scrolls over an article that seems to be fake, a warning appears informing the user that the source of the article may not be from a credible source. Daniel Sieradski, creator of the extension, said that he compiled a list of well-known hoax sites that the extension flags rather than developing an algorithm to warn users about individual articles. He also said the sites run across the political spectrum and users can submit requests to modify those settings on Github. “I built this in about an hour yesterday after reading [Mark Zuckerberg’s] BS about not being able to flag fake news sites. Of course you can. It just takes having a spine to call out nonsense. This is just a proof of concept at this point, but it works well enough,” said Sieradski. According to Gizmodo, Facebook was considering to implement tools that would block hoaxes on the social network, but abandoned the project with the fear of appearing politically biased.