Reality: Making Web great Again!

WEB: There is More to It than What Meets the Eye!

As we all know Lie travels faster than truth does and it affects the lives of people on a much larger scale than we think. Firstly, it creates confusion among masses leading to a changed thought about the product or person. A fine example of this would be the recent case of PewDiePie, the YouTube star, who was wrongfully portrayed as a anti-semi. Some people from the Wall Street Journal took a picture of PewDiePie out of context and portrayed him as a supporter of Nazism.

This lead to a LOT of misconceptions among the followers of PewDiePie (Felix) and many others. Even Disney severed its ties with the YouTube star for this reason. Felix went through a great financial and reputation loss due to it. There are many others like him who undergo such losses..

And to tackle this, we are here to introduce you to the Reality.

Our Journey:

After being a victim of falling into the trap of fake news, we thought of an elegant solution to overcome this menace. Initially we went through a rigorous brainstorming session to come up with some of the usual problem that most of the people face while surfing through the web.

After going through all the problems (such as identification of fake news articles, click bait titles) we went on refining this list by conducting a survey.

We considered where most of the people can encounter such fake news articles, which, in this case was Facebook and WhatsApp, and try to shape our product accordingly.

The most challenging part was to identify whether a news article is fake or not. We thought a lot and tried to come up with the best solution which was to take input from the users itself. This not only helps us to maintain our database but also generates a sense of trust among the users. But then again, there are people with malicious intentions, who try to abuse the system. Hence, we introduced the concept of Moderators.

Moderators were certain trusted people who had the ability to certify whether a news is legit or not. Now, there can be a LOT of websites which moderators will have to check. We viewed the problem from the other end and tried to decrease the work of the moderators too.

Moderators will only have to look into websites which crosses a certain threshold of page views. This system works because, larger the number of page views, farther is the news spreading and consequently, more number of people will be affected if it turned out to be a fake news. This way, we put a permanent end towards the spreading of fake content and prevent them from going viral.

But what if the website doesn't pass the threshold? Here's when the users come into play. In each website, the users can vote if the news content is fake or real. Based on the ratio of the votes, the website will be given a percentage rating which will help the users detect if the news is fake or not.

To take our product to the next level, we introduced a stunning yet beautiful user interface through a mobile app and a browser extension. We didn't want to interfere with what the user is reading, but also alert him if the page he is reading is certified or not. That's why we used a floating action button which provides easy functionality with a simple gesture. Users are able to upvote/downvote or write a review of the webpage with a single tap/click. The browser extension also has certain features such as whitelisting a particular domain or to pause scanning for fake news on a specific website/webpage.

Finally, we also added a website which will show up the trending fake stories/news. This will spread awareness among users and also help them differentiate between fake and actual news.

On mobile systems, since its not possible to read the current view every time (such as in the case of a WhatsApp message), we enabled the user to check whether a specific message is fake or not. The user will select the message and share it on our app. This will simply send the keywords from the message to the Reality app and the keywords will be matched with the database containing other trending fake WhatsApp messages. Higher the number of matches, higher is the probability of the message to be fake. A simple toast will pop-up denoting the percentage of the legitimacy of the message, and hence inform the user about it.

Thank you,
sapnu puas