This project was mainly inspired by divisive current events. In a day an age where information comes and goes, and credibility is constantly questioned, we developed an app extension to aid readers in making informed decisions of texts before they read it. We provide an interface integrated into the browsing experience, in order to give an overview of news sites a user may click on, providing the source's bias, reliability, and a brief analysis/description.
This draws information from https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/, and uses their analysis for the formation of source accuracy and bias, along with the analysis/description portion.
We also use the following to sample relevant sources: "Clemm von Hohenberg, B., Menchen-Trevino, E., Casas, A., Wojcieszak, M. (2021). A list of over 5000 US news domains and their social media accounts. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7651047"
The 'dataset_creation' portion of the project focuses on the webscraping of data from mediabiasfactcheck.com, in combination with the list of US news domains, in order to create an aggregate JSON file that contains the information we need for quick information retrieval. This information is then stored within the extension, which scans the current page for links. If the extension finds a match with a link, it inserts the desired resources to display to the user.
Utilize the requirements.txt files to install the necessary packages if you wish to utilize the webscraper written and collect data yourself.
For use of the extension, simply "load unpacked" the "InfoInsight" directory into chrome extensions. Read https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/getstarted/development-basics/ for more information.