Facebook's fake news problem has been making headlines in recent days on tech sites. After the sharp increase in fake news and Facebook's role in the recent US elections, as well as after the social network's CEO Mark Zuckerberg downplayed the problem ("more than 99 percent of what people see is authentic"), there doesn't seem to be a solution.
It's a problem that everyone (except Zuckerberg) knows about, and for now some people seem to be looking for solutions. Of course, there are already some proposals.
According to The Washington Post, four students, Anant Goel, Nabinta De, Qinglin Chen, and Mark Craft, managed to solve the problem very quickly.
At a hackathon held at Princeton University this week, students took on the challenge of solving Facebook's fake news problem.
They did it, and in record time: The project can be completed in just a day and a half.
How;
The winning team developed an algorithm that was able to distinguish fake from real news and then flag them on Facebook.
The system, called FiB, uses a Chrome extension that marks links on Facebook as “verified” or “unverified” based on several external factors.
Among these are the credibility of the source, and cross-referencing content with other news sources. If a news source fails the tests, the algorithm displays a link to the same story (if available) on a more reliable source.
The team is providing the algorithm it developed as open source, although it is temporarily unavailable due to high demand.
Let's hope Zuck learns about this particular algorithm, unless it's in his best interest not to learn about it..
https://devpost.com/software/fib
