How desi kids fixed Facebook's fake news problem in 36 hours

Anant Goel and Nabanita DeEven as Mark Zuckerberg scratches his head on finding ways to tackle the glitch in Facebookrsquos algorithm that is creating lsquoecho chambersrsquo for its users and helping spread viral fake content four teenagers have already found a way to plug it through a simple browser plugin Anant Goel and Nabanita De were part of the quad that made the brainwave tangible during a 36hour hackathon at Princeton University midday speaks to them about their inventionQinglin Chen Mark Craft Anant Goel and Nabanita De made FiBThe group of college students created the plugin at HackPrinceton last week held at Princeton University Ironically Facebook was one of the sponsors of the event ldquoThe hackathon is a 36hour event where teams of up to four people work on a project from scratchrdquo said 18yearold Anant Goel a Mumbaikar who is currently in his freshman year studying computer science at Purdue University in West LafayetteldquoNo team is assigned to a task in the hackathon you are free to build what you like during these 36 hours After the time is up the teams show their projects to a panel of judges which decides the winnersrdquoIt was during those 36 hours that Goel along with Nabanita De Qinglin Chen and Mark Craft created the Google Chrome extension lsquoFiB Stop living a liersquo which is capable of quickly and accurately identifying fake news stories on FacebookAssembling the teamldquoI spoke to Anant on the Slack Channel a messaging app for teams on the first day of the hackathon and he introduced me to Mark and Qinglin sophomores at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign who he had just met and added me to their teamrdquo said De who is pursuing a Masters degree in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst When asked how such an idea executed by four students who barely had any time to brainstorm before this event let alone develop the algorithm for it in 36 hours she said ldquoI was reading this news of people blaming Facebook for US election results and felt pretty bad about it while I was on my way to Princeton I brought this idea up with my team and we brainstormed together on how to tackle the issuerdquoHow FiB worksldquoThis extension adds a verified or nonverified tag over every post containing links or pictures while you are scrolling on social mediardquo explains DeldquoFor links we obtain a credible score for each one If that score is good enough we tag it as verified If we canrsquot verify the link our algorithm uses keywords from the linkrsquos content search on Bing web search engine to find more credible summarised content content from links which shows up on searches and is assigned good scores by our systemIt also works for pictures Given a tweet snapshot our algorithm verifies from Twitter if that tweet was really posted by the user It also tags adultpornographic content as unverifiedrdquoSmall steps to larger goalBut is it the solution to Facebookrsquos woes ldquoI like to think of FiB as a proof of concept We just wanted to show that there is a way to detect fake news algorithmicallyrdquo said Goel ldquoObviously FiB is just a small step towards a much larger goal of disrupting the lsquofake newsrsquo economies that thrive because of social media The algorithm is not perfect right now we are continuing to develop it This is a huge project and will likely require constant improvementrdquoTalking about the algorithm De said ldquoI believe we have a long way to go Right now it works decently but we want it to be perfect It is important for people to know what is real and what is fake because often the news plays on peoplersquos conformational bias For example if you donrsquot like a politician and then read fake news bashing them you would believe the news and start hating them more We want to end that conformational biasrdquoThe path aheadDe admits the response has been lsquocrazyrsquo ever since the extension went liveldquoWe have more than 50000 users trying to access our extension Since our servers are built for limited users mdash being students we do not have funding hence just utilising free resources mdash it is unable to handle it Right now we are more concerned about building a good product rather than revenue and hence we would love to get funding to buy new servers and API keys to scale our system There are a lot of developers who are interested in how we built the extension and have been playing with it and suggesting changesrdquo says DeldquoCurrently the only way to access FiB is through the Chrome browser but we do plan on supporting other browsers and mobile platforms in the futurerdquo said Anant