fakeBlock

The Misinformation Blocking Browser Extension

RPI Software Design & Documentation S21

fakeBlock is a cross-platform browser extension that functions like an ad-block, but for fake news.

Check out the demo! https://youtu.be/AVXcAdskUsw

We use a neural network trained on 1.8M news articles to detect whether or not a paragraph contains misinformation, then hide the offending paragraph. You can click on a button to reveal the blocked information and open a results page with data about why our model blocked it, such as probability scores and category tags.

Installing fakeBlock

Chrome webstore and Firefox addon store release soon! Waiting on review. For now, build from source and install with the methods below.

Building fakeBlock from source

Run the following commands:

1. npm install .
2. npm run build

There should be a new folder dist/.

This is the unpacked extension that can be loaded into your browser.

Installing fakeBlock from dist/

To install on chrome:

1. Visit chrome://extensions (via omnibox or menu -> Tools -> Extensions).
2. Enable Developer mode by ticking the checkbox in the upper-right corner.
3. Click on the "Load unpacked extension..." button.
4. Select the dist/ folder.

To install on firefox:

1. Open the about:debugging page
2. Click "This Firefox" (in newer versions of Firefox)
3. Click "Load Temporary Add-on"
4. Select dist/manifest.json

Running unit tests

Run npm run test to lint the codebase and run our jest testing suite.

Initial files based off browser-extension-template