The “B.S. Detector” Chrome extension, a new project released on Tuesday, claims to identify and flag fake news online. The extension identifies articles on Facebook that are from a “questionable source.” The warning appears when users scroll over the article on a feed.
The creator of the extension, Daniel Sieradski, said on Product Hunt 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 said the sites run across the political spectrum. 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,” Sieradski wrote. “This is just a proof of concept at this point, but it works well enough.”
The extension is a useful one for Facebook, where articles from the New York Times appear next to hoaxes from InfoWars with no distinction between them on Facebook’s news feed. It’ll be even more useful if the hyper-partisan Facebook users who are most susceptible to Facebook hoaxes actually download the extension.
Source: mashable.com
