Fake News: Tools

Alexa allows you to plug in a website and learn which other sites are referring users to it, and what Google keywords will lead you it. Can help spot a group of news websites that are related in certain ways. Its suite of intuitive analytics products transforms data into meaningful insights.

“News and issues from multiple perspectives” (left, centre, right). Includes a search tool that aims to highlight different perspectives on a topic. Not a fact-checking tool, per se, may be a useful resources for discovering different takes on a story. Don’t be fooled by media bias and fake news.

This game puts you in charge of a fake news publication. You learn what goes into successful bad news and how people manipulate it. It takes 10-15 minutes and might leave you wanting to play it again. The game is intended for use in education and scientific research. 

The Wall Street Journal created the visualisation to provide a stark visual representation of the very different messages that Americans receive via social media based upon their political beliefs and browsing habits. It provides a side-by-side look at how topics are treated within different populations and from different sources.

Botometer checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score based on how likely the account is to be a bot. This is a tool to classify Twitter accounts as human or bot. Higher scores are more bot-like. Use of this service requires Twitter authentication and permissions.

This browser extension works on Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, and gives you warnings when you are on a page that contains possible fake news. It analyses the site links to check for unreliable sources and possible fake news and then tells you why a particular site was flagged.

When you search for information, you're going to find lots of it but is it good information? The CRAAP Test is a list of questions to help you evaluate the information you find. The different criteria will be more or less important depending on your situation or need.

IMVAIN is a mneumonic used to evaluate sources in news stories: Independent sources preferable to self-interested sources, Multiple sources preferable to single source, Sources who provide verifiable information, Authoritative and/or Informed sources preferable to sources who are uninformed or lack authoritative background, Named sources better than anonymous ones.

EduCheck has 200 resources available in 15 languages from 57 fact-checking platforms, related to media literacy and fact-checking.It includes a lesson plan on how fake news spreads, video on fact-checking, interactive quiz to distinguish fake from real news and connects users with fact-checkers around the world.

As people rely more and more on social media to get their news, the filter bubble becomes increasingly problematic. In this workshop, students learn how to evaluate whether a news site is reliable. This group activity takes 30 minutes and can be used by different audiences by adjusting the examples used.

Factitious is a game for testing your skill at identifying fake news stories. The game was developed by the American University Game Lab and the American University's School of Communication tasked with exploring the intersection of journalism and game design. It doesn’t take too long to play and gives great insights.

Fake It to Make It is a social-impact game about fake news. It is built to make players more aware of how and why fake news is written and distributed.This game puts you right into the mindset of someone who manipulates social media purely for profit.

This Chrome extension is actually built on a neural network, using machine learning to predict whether the website you are visiting is spreading fake news or not. It only runs when you ask it to, which some users may appreciate.

This extension for Chrome marks fake news in the pages that you are browsing. The extension marks fake news in red and in orange the clickbait or probably fake news links. On Facebook, page may load new posts while scrolling which could cause problems to our detector. Click on the logo again to resolve the issue.

Using this extension for Chrome you can identify fake news web sites based on whether they are similar to known false news sites using the power of AI. The extension analyses these websites using a neural network similar to the one powering other AI applications, like Siri and self-driving cars.

Thanks to the internet and social media, misinformation travels much faster than it used to, and it can have serious repercussions. This fact sheet will help consumers evaluate the accuracy of what they read or hear, avoid “fake news” and refrain from spreading false stories.

In 2016, a Google Doc created by Professor Melissa Zimdars went viral. It provides advice on how to evaluate news articles (with a list of websites to avoid or question). Many of the sites on the list are aggregators – they take news stories from other sources and rewrite them with inflammatory headlines and without contextual facts.

Fátima , in short for Fact Machine, finds misinformation spreading online and jumps in with verified facts. It uses a database of links to misinformation and corresponding debunkings updated by Brazilian media startup Aos Fatos. It is supported by the Google News Initiative. The tool is available in Portuguese.

FiB is an excellent tool that makes sure your newsfeed is always accurate. It has over 1.5 billion users and works according to a two fold algorithm: content-consumption and content-creation. This chrome extension uses advanced web scraping techniques to extract links, posts and images which is sent to AI to analyse.

This glossary has been created by Stony Brook University's Centre for News Literacy for its Digital Resource Centre. This glossary is meant to be useful not only for students but also to the new generation of news literate citizens to help judge the reliability and relevance of information around the world.

This Google search function allows a quick check to see if images in an article have been used previously. Often, fake news articles borrow images from legitimate sources. This function allows you to find similar images, the websites that contain these images and, other sizes of the picture you searched with.

This glossary features the most frequently used and commonly misunderstood words, acronyms, and phrases that relate to information disorder. It is designed to be a living document that will evolve as a reference point alongside research findings, shifts in technology, and the inevitable debates sparked by the definitions.

Digital archive of publicly accessible Web pages and information from the Internet. Launched in 2001 and operated by Internet Archive, a non-profit in San Francisco. Want to compare facts or analysis available on a website today compared to information available on that same site last year, or five years ago?

Know your meme is a website dedicated to documenting Internet phenomena such as viral videos and image macros. It researches and documents Internet memes and viral phenomena. Founded in December of 2008, Know Your Meme's research is handled by an independent professional editorial and research staff and community members.

This is a list of fake news sites. These sites intentionally, but not necessarily solely, publish hoaxes and disinformation for purposes other than news satire. Some of these sites use homograph spoofing attacks, typo-squatting and other deceptive strategies similar to those used in phishing attacks to resemble genuine news outlets.

This Chrome extension is powered by the MediaBiasFactCheck database, and it not only alerts you when you are browsing a fake news site but will clue you into the political biases of legitimate sites as well. Accurate facts do not guarantee truth, after all; different presentations can leave you with very different ideas.

A challenging game that engages players with the standards of journalism, showing how to spot a variety of methods behind the viral deception we all face today. Join a fictional social media site focused on news and information, and meet the challenge to level up from guest user to site admin.

FiB is a chrome extension for detecting Fake News on Facebook. When the user scrolls through their Facebook page, on the top right corner for every Facebook post, it would tag the news as verified and non-verified where non-verified is potentially fake news.

RADAR stands for relevance, authority, date, relevance, rationale. It is a framework that can help you remember what kinds of questions you should be asking about an information source as you evaluate it for quality and usefulness in your research. It’s a good approach to be used to evaluate news sources.

Perform a search by image. This extension allows to perform an inverse image search on multiple image search engines Google, Bing, Yandex, TinEye and Baidu. You can configure the context menu to contain either a single button with your default search engine, or a cascaded menu with all included search engines.

Got a political argument you want to settle? Wondering about the facts in the latest campaign ad? Get the free Settle It! app from PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site. A project of the PolitiFact Lab at Poynter Institute funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

The Process of Establishing Integrity Checklist is by Dr. Susan Maret, a l lecturer at the School of Information, San Jose State University, and also a Project Censored contributor. It is designed to provide a "self-empowering and didactic path to finding trustworthy articles and sources of information."

TinEye is an image search and recognition company in Canada. We are experts in computer vision, pattern recognition, neural networks and machine learning. Our mission is to make your images searchable. We deliver image search and recognition solutions to the industries where searching images is a critical mission.   

TwitterTrails is a tool that allows media members to track the trustworthiness of Twitter stories. Their algorithm measures how widely the story spread and how sceptical users are about its validity. By measuring crowd behaviour, the algorithm allows journalists to investigate claims and determine whether they are true or false.

With Veracity, you can perform reverse image search on any image. It allows you to find out what the subject of a photo is, discover where else on the web the same photo exists, even it if has been cropped or edited, root out profiles that use fake photos.

In an attempt to make verification just a bit easier for beginners, First Draft has developed an all-in-one toolbox from which users can do standard verification checks. It is a list of tools and sites recommended by the First Draft Coalition to help in social news gathering, verification etc.

This tool allows you to investigate the domain behind a website. Learn how DomainTools takes indicators from your network, including domains and IPs, and connects them with nearly every active domain on the internet. These connections help security professionals profile attackers, guide online fraud investigations, and map cyber activity to attacker infrastructure.

A “computational knowledge engine.” aims “to collect and curate all objective data and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.” For example: to find facts about past weather for a given place and date, which can be helpful to determine the credibility of claims about a photograph.

The YouTube Data Viewer is a simple tool to extract hidden data from videos hosted on YouTube. It allows you to extract the following variables, which are most useful for tracking down original content: Exact upload time and All thumbnails. It was developed by David Danforth for the Citizen Evidence Lab.

A list of non-academic readings related to different aspects of "fake news” covering the impact of advertising, its role in the US election, the growing awareness of disinformation campaigns aimed at upcoming European elections, and some psychological theories that help explain why our brains can be so easily fooled.