Yale Students Develop Plug-in to Combat Fake News

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 newsA 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.

Tags: College Insurrection, Yale

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