A.I. fact checking tool

Problem

Personal Frustration

I've been watching the Brexit campaign & the Trump leadership destroy what I thought was an acquired skill in western society: reason. Decisions and leadership based on facts, science and common sense. I think misinformation is a big culprit in this evolution, as a big proportion of the population does not have the necessary educational background to understand that they're being manipulated.
 

Hackathon "hack the crisis"

When covid started, a good friend of mine working for E&Y convinced me to join a virtual hackathon over the course of 3 days. I was already playing around with the idea of building a browser extension that would add facts, data, graphs to news articles in order to give perspective and reduce the "sensational value".
 

A skilled team

Tweaking the idea to a feasible V1

I’ve put that idea forward, which attracted a lot of interest from other participants. Mainly a small team of Belgian developers who were already building a Machine Learning fact-checking tool. The idea we settled on was to continue the development of the fact-checking tool instead of what I called "Augmented Information".
 

We had a lot of past development & skills to work with

A part of the team had already built a software that scrapes fact-checking websites and stores those fact-checks in a database. They had also started on a Machine learning feature that uses Natural Language Processing algorithms to match sentences with the fact-checks. We also had a guy with chrome extension experience, a designer, and a journalist!
 

48 hours of hard work

During the hackathon, a part of the team focused on developing a chrome extension that would fetch the titles of posts on online newspapers as well as a user’s facebook feed. Another part of the team used that input to work on the matching algorithm. This had to work fast in order to return results in real time. The results could be no match, or if it was matched, a degree of certainty that the article tells the truth.

2 others worked on designing a logo, name for the tool, U.I. for the extension. Finally, I worked on managing the team, planning, collecting the feedback and preparing our presentation, the pitch in front of the jury, website and social media presence.

Live fact-checking!

The tool could do live checking and is a great prototype

We've managed to build a chrome extension that worked (download here) on the 2 biggest belgian newspapers, Facebook and could easily be extended to more platforms. The sourcing of fact-checks was working as well and could easily be extended to other languages and more sources. The algorithm worked fast enough to deliver real-time labels on all the platforms.
 

4th place & Facebook fact-checking

We were relatively pleased with fourth place. The theme of the weekend was “hack the covid crisis” and the jury found our approach of tackling fake news a bit out of scope. We knew that, but it's always more fun to win! :)

Let me know if you want to help

If you have questions regarding the "enriching / augmenting" part of the project or if you want to continue this project with me --> feel free to contact me !