Authentic is a Chrome extension that allows people to understand when they might be reading an untrustworthy news source. When a news article they are reading has a possibility of being questionable.
On November 7th, the Borderline shooting occurred in Thousand Oaks. Absolutely shocked to see Thousand Oaks next to the words "mass shooting" all over the internet, we tried to look for productive discussion on how to decrease mass shootings in order to find solace. However, all we found were factually incorrect argumentative comments and people labeling each other as "communist liberals" and "white elitists."
The extension serves to detect the domain that the user is currently browsing and compares it against a database of websites that are known to be either "trustworthy" or "untrustworthy." This is decided based on a database compiled by MediaBiasFactCheck.com's analysis on the factual reporting of the website source. If the website may be untrustworthy, we then display a banner that alerts the user, notifying them that they are browsing a potentially untrustworthy website. To remedy this, we provide a link to a recommended article that is relevant to the topic they are currently reading about from a trusted news source instead. We also provide users with additional links to articles should they choose to look for additional sources.
Building this web extension was a very challenge experience for us because we were not familiar with JavaScript. However, we were able to learn the syntax and accomplish our project with research, (little sleep!) and patience. Trough the process we also discovered many news changes we always thought were credible but were actually deemed as mixed factual quality by MediaBiasFactCheck.org which further proves how significant our web extension is for everyone.
