Fake news is rife on the internet, and when you make the equation of Facebook’s current algorithm plus your confirmation biases, multiplied by the number of people on the social media website, then it can be easy for fake news to slip through one’s feed, masquerading as well, real news.
Let’s face it: not everyone is equipped with spidey senses (or you know, common sense) to spot the true facts from the fabricated ones, and even the keenest of people could be fooled by a particularly deceptive story, which is where Fakeblok comes in.
Fakeblok is a collaboration between the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines and the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, that vets before showing up on your feed. The plug-in will alert you as to whether a link from your feed contains fake news, but you can still click on it if you want to.
Facebook rolled out a similar feature months ago, by the way, yet the plug-in is totally interactive: not only does the Chrome browser extension tag these fake news sites, users can also submit suspicious-looking articles, to be fact-checked by an independent group of journalists.
Thoughts on this? Will you be downloading this?
