Definately falling into the "I’ll beleive it when I see it" category is an extension developed by an MIT student for his Masters thesis which is intended to check the accuracy of information on the web. Specifically, with the help of Politifact it will be checking the accuracy of political statements. The big problem is going to be the quality of the facts database it checks against, as you can only be as good as the database so if it gets out of date or starts to lean one way or the other it might do more harm than good. On the other hand we can hope that this might make people a little more leery of getting their information from only one source and not doing even a bit of fact checking on their own. Take a look at the full story over at The Register.
Thanks Neiman Journalism Lab!
"A student at MIT’s Media Lab is developing a browser plug-in that can check the accuracy of information posted online, and may use it to monitor political speeches for untruths.
For his master’s thesis, Dan Schultz – who was recently named a 2011 Knight-Mozilla Fellow – came up with the idea for “truth goggles” while talking to a fact checker at Truthsquad, who was explaining that the principle problem with fact checking was getting people access to the skinny. Schultz then came up with the idea as a way to correct incorrect information, but more importantly to get people to think critically about what they are reading."
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