Four college students who attended a hackathon at Princeton University came up with an algorithm that authenticates what is real from what is not on Facebook.
The students Nabanite De, Anent Goel, Mark Craft, Qinglin Chen called their project "FiB: Stop living a lie." It is a Chrome browser extension they came up within just 36 hours. The extension classifies every post, as verified or non-verified using artificial intelligence.
The plug-in the students created has been released as an open-source project to allow any developer with the skills and know-how can install it and tweak and improve it, The Washington Post reported. However, the plug-in is not the total solution for Facebook to guard itself.
Facebook has been accused and criticized for allegedly playing a role in disseminating fake news and misleading stories that are virtually indistinguishable from real news. Facebook's algorithm determines what each individual's choices, the social media platform will show these items based regardless if the content is true.
The stories on Facebook apparently got so bad that it prompted President Barack Obama to call Facebook a "dust cloud of nonsense," according to Business Insider. Half the nation blames Facebook for Donald Trump's victory during the last elections. A recent Pew Study claims that 63 percent of U.S. Adults use Facebook as their main source of news and issues, according to Business Insider.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO still maintains, however, that the idea of fake news on Facebook is a very small amount. He thinks that influencing the elections in any way is a crazy idea. Reportedly, many Facebook employees are so upset with the current situation that a group of maverick Facebook employees is taking it upon themselves to look into the situation and try to fix the issue.
Incidentally, Facebook was one of the companies who sponsored the hackathon event that the students took part in.
