Overview

The political bias of a news outlet - that is, the specific political ideology or party that it favours - can dictate what piece of news get covered and how the events are framed. With the rise of online news consumption, misinformation and biasedreporting have become increasingly pervasive.

What was our goal?

With Verifai, we aim to provide a fact-checking tool that empowers people to understand and stay informed about the biases in the news they consume. This project was inspired by the work of Ground.news.

Solution

Verifai is a Ruby on Rails app that uses the Chat Completion OpenAI API in order to provide users with 2 main data points: a credibility score indicating the accuracy and reliability of this news; and the political bias indicating the specific ideology or party this news favors.

Additionally, we developed a (non-published) Chrome extension that offers the same results, except this time it is contextual, allowing users to fact-check news without leaving the news website.

Code available in GitHub.
Website live at verifai.site

Ruby on Rails | Hotwire | PostreSQL | JavaScript

Website live at verifai.site

Code available in GitHub

Role and achievements

As this was the final project of a coding bootcamp, all 4 members contributed to the backend and frontend. On top of this, I took 1.5 days out of the 2 weeks to create the designs with the shadcndesign visual language.

Backend features as creating the history page, integration with OpenAI and implemented a pugin .

Frontend features as creating css variables for everyone in the team to use and styling pages.

Designed the app and plugin by myself in 1.5 days with the use of the shadcndesing library.

Solution highlights

Fact-checker page

Users can paste or use the microphone to submit a piece of news. We send the message to the OpenAI API as part of the prompt, making sure that the AI returns the political bias and credibility score, using the media bias fact check methodology.

Chrome extension

Since copy-pasting a piece of news from the media webpage to Verifai can be cumbersome, we decided to create a Chrome extension so that users can fact-check their news, in the context where they are reading them.

The extension is not public, but the demo below shows how it works.