facto

Inspiration

We are now in the digital era. People use social media and platforms to see news, connect with each other, share each other's thoughts. But the digital era brings some side effects also. Fake news is spreading more quickly and heavily. So we planned to make an application that can detect such fake news and give a list of documents in favor or against that news to the facto users.

What it does

If you have some information with you that you want to confirm, write( or paste ) the data on the text area and click the submit button. After some time, all the relevant articles from different media sources will be shown. Now, have a look at those articles, go through them, and check if the information is valid or not.

How we built it

The front end of Facto doesn't directly make the GET or POST request to elastic search API. Instead, when you click the submit button, it makes a POST request to the backend Facto server, the server then makes a GET request to elastic cloud facto search engine( with all the credentials ) and fetch the relevant response

Challenges we ran into

Facto depends on the news API provided by newsapi.org. Unfortunately, the free developer plan of newsapi allows using the API from localhost only. Again, for the limited plan, we couldn't have a good amount of news articles available to the elastic search database, reducing the efficiency of this Web App.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As of now, facto can take the input text from the user and can check whether it has any supportive articles or documents. But unfortunately, the collection of news articles is not huge enough (as the developer plan of newsapi.org allows a very limited amount of usage), so this app may not be very accurate in many cases. But we are planning to add more data from govt sources and other sources to make it as efficient as possible.

What we learned

It was the first time to use react-bootsrap and elastic search on our application. Also, we learned how to integrate the newsapi with the facto server to store the news articles on the elastic cloud store.

What's next for facto

The next plan is to add data from all the government sources to the elastic cloud database. So that Facto can detect fake claims and propaganda. We plan to use machine learning to make it as accurate as possible.

Built With

• elastic-cloud
• express.js
• newsapi.org
• node.js
• react
• react-bootstrap