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anantdgoel / ProjectFib

Chrome extension to flag fake news on Facebook. Built at HackPrinceton '16
https://www.projectfib.com
Open Software License 3.0
747 stars 180 forks source link

Stop using Web of Trust #23

Open t-s opened 7 years ago

t-s commented 7 years ago

There's a number of other metrics to use to judge a webpage's reliability than using the WoT, unless you'd like to support a commercial entity that accrues revenue by violating users' trust. http://lifehacker.com/web-of-trust-sells-your-browsing-history-uninstall-it-1788667989

A few ideas might include using Moz's MozRank service, verifying an SSL cert, and checking the age of a domain in its WHOIS record to judge the reliability of a webpage and its content. I'd be happy to provide a fork demonstrating an example of how this may be equally as effective and not half as morally dubious.

anantdgoel commented 7 years ago

Hey,

We did not know this, thanks for bringing this to our attention, we will definitely stop using WOT now.

t-s commented 7 years ago

:100: Awesome, great to hear. Sorry, my comment was pretty harsh - know that I love your guys' idea, and think it can make a huge, huge difference. Great work!

santteegt commented 7 years ago

Hello,

Interesting info about WOT. I stated checking your proposed alternative and one of the main drawbacks of using MozRank is that in its free version, it only allows you to make one request every 10 secs. (big problem when testing the app due to the iterative nature of the current solution)

t-s commented 7 years ago

Hi Santteegt - Yes, that makes things a little more difficult. My first thought would be to to cache requests and save results in a backend DB as they're processed, but it would definitely need to be augmented with something to get around the time limit. I'll have to see if there's more affordable alternatives.

Part of me wants to try a fork that attempts automated fact checking. Something like looking at the content of an article and using an API like IBM's AlchemyData News API that's looked at previous news articles and ask it how likely claims contained in a link are true according to previously published works. It, too, is a paid service with a very small free tier, though. I guess the truth doesn't come cheap.