Fake News Debunker for Chrome

In this day and age, you never quite know whether what's on the news is veracious or not. Fake news is the buzzword of these past few years, and that's because misinformation is only running more and more rampant. While fact checking algorithms have been put in place by several social media websites, their viability and accuracy still remains doubtful.

The only thing that remains is to fact-check the news by yourself, using critical thinking and perusing as many sources as possible, comparing every bit of data. To assist with that, Fake News Debunker for Chrome offers an extensive toolset to help you analyze and cross-check the information you see on the news.

There isn't much to installing this extension: add it to Chrome, and that's that. Operating it may feel a bit cumbersome at first — owing to the many functions on offer — but you'll appreciate the capabilities in the long run.

Navigate to a news article, then open the assistant for the current page. The add-on will then verify and analyze the information, providing users with text topics, media analysis, and more.

Based on what it finds, users can magnify the images in the article, look up their metadata, as well as make use of the forensic and OCR tools to spot picture manipulation. To do so, the extension puts various filters at your disposal, to help with finding compression, manipulation traces, cloning, and so forth.

In addition to that, you can reverse search the media through Google, Baidu, Bing, and other similar engines.

Moreover, fake news can spread through videos, and the extension has a way to help users spot that. By pasting the clip's YouTube link, contextual information about its origin can be provided. The same can be done with thumbnails, keyframes, as well as metadata and video rights.

Through the Factchecks search, users can look up news from trusted providers via a customized engine. Type in what interests you, and results from FactCheck.org, First Draft, France24, and other such news outlets will appear.

To further help users spot honest content, the Classroom section is there to help teach of common manipulation and fake news tactics. This is to aid users in developing a keen eye for misinformation: various educational resources are available, and there's also a Gamification category where users can have fun learning about dishonest news phenomena.

Fake News Debunker for Chrome is indeed the verification Swiss army knife it claims to be. In the interest of curbing misinformation, the use of such tools should be more prevalent.