In the past year, fake news has become a rampant problem on Facebook.Â
The spread of misinformation is so broad and nebulous that it has proven challenging for the company to contain. After initially denying that the platform had a fake news problem, Mark Zuckerberg vowed in April to address the problem head-on. Its solution was to bring inthird-party fact-checkers to help vet information and add warning labels to potentially false news stories. So far, however, the system hasn't had a large impact.
Meanwhile, two Berkeley college students, Ash Bhat, 20, and Rohan Phadte, 19, have taken things into their own hands.Â
In late April, the two computer science majors built aFacebook Messenger bot that, when fed a link, will tell you whether the article in question is or isn't "fake news."
The Messenger bot, named NewsBot, took them only a few weeks to build, yet it's one of the only tools of its kind. In addition to sussing out the validity of an article, it also offers a barometer showing whether the article is deemed biased toward the left or right.
Bhat and Phadte were both taking machine-learning classes at Berkeley this year when the idea for the tool first came to them.
"I see tech as having this responsibility in terms of giving people the tools to be more informed," Bhat said in an interview. He and his friends, many of whom are very politically active, watched the spread of false information proliferate on Facebook throughout the 2016 election and were troubled by what they saw.
Bhat, who has built civic tech tools before in his spare time, thought that perhaps they could use machine learning to build a bot that would help put articles people find on Facebook in context.
He and Phadte set to work building an algorithm.
In order to train the algorithm that the bot runs on they fed it over 10,000 articles from around the web. The first and largest batch of articles were sourced from sites that skew far on either end of the spectrum.
To teach the algorithm to recognize right-leaning content they fed it thousands of articles from Breitbart, a hyperconservative news website. Then they fed it articles from BlueDotDaily, to teach it to recognize the opposite.
Soon the bot could determine the biases of articles from all types of sites in the middle. The more it's used, the more accurate it becomes.
But while the students have built a useful tool, it's not perfect. "We're still making updates and changes almost every day,"Â Bhat said.
