Facebook has a news problem, whether it wants to admit it or not. Following the election, the company is under increased scrutiny to improve safeguards against including fake news stories in its trending topics.
But some people aren’t waiting for the company to fix things.
If you’re worried about the amount of hogwash in your Facebook feed, here are three extensions that will help you cut out the noise.
FiB: Stop living a lie
Created over the course of 36 hours by four college students during a hackathon at Princeton University, this Chrome extension goes through your Facebook feed in real time as your browse and verifies posts. Whether it’s a status update, image, or links, its backend AI runs a fact check using image recognition, keyword extraction, and source verification.
If the app can verify the story, you’ll see a little blue box with “verified” in the top right of the post. For something created during a hackathon, the extension is remarkable, able to recognize misleading headlines and false stories with ease. The extension is live on the Chrome store, and will continue as an open-source project; if you’re interested in contributing you can join the team here.
B.S. Detector
This works similarly to FiB, however, it works on Facebook, Twitter, and on any news site you visit. When it detects a link to a B.S. story it tells you “this website is considered a questionable source,” and lets you make up your own mind. The brainchild of Daniel Sieradski, B.S. Detector is a little quicker than FiB but doesn’t offer its image-verification powers. You can download it from the Chrome store for free.
Media Bias/Fact Check
While Media Bias/Fact Check doesn’t scan your Facebook, it will help you when you end up on a site with questionable news. Or any other type of news. The app works by scraping data from Media Bias Fact Check, a wonderful site that checks for bias across all ideological spectrums.
When you land on a news page and press the MB/FC icon in Chrome, the extension will tell you exactly what kind of bias you can expect from your source. Left, right, center, or somewhere in space, MB/FC will tell you who is lying and when.
