Yale Students Develop Plug-in to Combat Fake News
“designed as an extension for Google’s Chrome browser”
This is a little suspicious. Who decides what qualifies as fake news? And how long will it take for this to be used in a partisan way?
The Washington Times reports:
Yale University students come up with plug-in to combat fake news
A team of college students is getting attention from internet companies and Congress after developing a browser extension that alerts users to fake and biased news stories and helps guide them to more balanced coverage.
The plug-in, “Open Mind,” was developed earlier this month during a 36-hour problem-solving competition known as a hackathon at Yale University.
The winning team was comprised of four students: Michael Lopez-Brau and Stefan Uddenberg, both doctoral students in Yale’s psychology department; Alex Cui, an undergraduate who studies machine learning at the California Institute of Technology; and Jeff An, who studies computer science at the University of Waterloo and business at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario.
That team competed against others to win a challenge from Yale’s Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, which asked students to find a way to counter fake news.
The team’s software, designed as an extension for Google’s Chrome browser, will display a warning screen when someone enters a site known to disseminate fake news. It also will alert a reader if a story shared on social media is fake or biased.
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Comments
A product clearly intended to help the user avoid contamination by wrongthink.
So it warns you if you go to a site not sanctioned by their JournoLists?