Facebook's fake news problem has made quite a few headlines in recent days on tech sites. After the dramatic increase in fake news and Facebook's role in recent elections of the US, as well as after the downgrading of the problem by the CEO of the social network Mark Zuckerberg (“more than 99 percent of what people see is authentic ”), there does not seem to be a solution.
It is a problem that everyone knows (except Zuckerberg), and for now some seem to be looking for solutions. Of course, there are already some suggestions.
According to The Washington Post, four students, Anant Goel, Nabinta De, Qinglin Chen, and Mark Craft managed to solve the problem very quickly.
In a hackathon held at Princeton University this week, students took on the challenge of solving Facebook's fake news problem.
They did it in record time: The project can be completed in just one and a half days.
How;
The winning team developed an algorithm that was able to distinguish the fake from real news and then highlight them on Facebook.
The system, called FiB uses an extension of Chrome which marks Facebook links as "verified" or "unverified" depending on several external factors.
Among these are the credibility of the source, and the intersection of content with other news sources. If the source of a news item does not pass the tests, the algorithm displays a link to the same story (if any) to a more reliable source.
The team provides the algorithm it developed as open source, although it is temporarily unavailable availabledue to high demand.
Hopefully Zuck will find out about this algorithm, unless it is in his best interest not to know…
https://devpost.com/software/fib
