What?: To Fight Fake News | Who?: Agicent | Why?: Fake news needs to die
Fake news is a demon staring in our face. We need the solution, strategy tools or whatever we can get to fight fake news. Like a termite, it’s licking up our society hollow. But why?
Fake news is a fabricated piece of information which aims to defame an agency, public figure, governments, etc., for financial or political gains. People use the fake news as a tool to carry out a hidden agenda to change the perception of people and spread hoaxes and wrong information among masses.
The term is not new, but it rose to its notoriety after the 2016 US Presidential elections. The mainstream media accused propagation of fake news on Facebook as the main reason behind the victory of Donald Trump. According to Buzzfeed, the biggest fake election news, which changed the result was “Pope Francis shocks the world, endorses Donald Trump for president, releases the statement.”
The 2016 US election is just an example of the potential consequences of how fake news can impact the conscious mind of people and persuade them to take a decision that they initially were not willing to. So why fake news spread so fast? Because it sounds more exciting than a real story and urges people to share them without validating the source of the story. In fact, the term Fake News was so overused that Collins termed it as its official word of the year 2017.
How Agicent plan to tackle this problem:
At Agicent, we feel and understand the consequences of fake news, and how important it is to spot them in order to stop the flow of misinformation on the Internet. We are partnering with potential entrepreneurs sharing the same common goal to identify fake news and notify users about it. With the joint effort, we aim to build an AI solution which will identify, present and communicate detected fake news on social media platforms and other internet sources.
More specifically, we are working to build a mobile app and web portal which will list all the identified fake stories in the internet country wise. Users will also be able to subscribe to our automated emails in which we will share the fake news as per their selected location. The mobile app and website are being backed up with an AI solution which will check if the published or shared news is genuine or not.
Over the years, the number of anonymous hosted fake news websites has grown exponentially to gain political and financial gains. Technically, it is not very difficult to clone an authentic news website and fool people to believe in the wrong words. It just takes a few minutes to set up a fake Facebook and Twitter accounts and then start spreading the false words. Surprisingly, people are using technology like AI chatbots on social media platforms to interact with people and share adultered stories with them.
How our AI solution will achieve this feat?
We can’t share the technical details, but here is the outline of our idea. Basically, anyone can easily differentiate between a genuine and fake news story, given the fact that they are vigilant enough while surfing the net and exploring their social media news feeds.
Here is the manual checklist that anyone can use to check if a news is true or not:-
- Does the news source use excessive punctuation!!!
- Is the news source authentic? The URL of the news websites reveals it all. In case of forged news websites, the URL looks pretty similar to popular digital news publishing houses. A simple Google search is the second signal you can use to determine the credibility of the source.
- Does news source cite any official/authorized or good quality sources?
- Check the news on several good fact-checking websites like FactCheck.org, Snopes.com, etc.
- Verify images used in the news by reverse image search to see if it’s related to the cited story or not.
- Does the news story claims to reveal a secret or includes some clickbait phrases in its title?
- Check author’s identity and credibility.
- Check the date of the published news story.
- See if the website post satirical, joke or humorous news with no intention of harm.
Basically, our AI solution will automate all of these manual checklists to figure out whether a given news source is trustable or not.
Apart from this main project, we will also develop a browser plugin which will flag the fake stories so that users can immediately know and switch to other reliable sources of information. Down the line, we will extend our Fake News detection system to allow citizens to submit stories that they think are fake.
We are probably fighting with the evilest thing on the internet today, and the path to success isn’t easy at all. But our partners and in-house developers are researching day and night to make the dream project a reality. Hopefully, we will soon accomplish our goal and launch our mobile and web Fake News detection portal (backed by powerful AI and machine learning algorithms).
Help us fight fake news, write to us at sales@agicent.com, we look forward to your valuable suggestions and ideas.
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