aedFaCT: Scientific Fact-Checking Made Easier via Semi-Automatic Discovery of Relevant Expert Opinions

Understand

In this highly digitised world, fake news is a challenging problem that can cause serious harm to society.

• Considering how fast fake news can spread, automated methods, tools and services for assisting users to do fact-checking (i.e., fake news detection) become necessary and helpful, for both professionals, such as journalists and researchers, and the general public such as news readers.
• Experts, especially researchers, play an essential role in informing people about truth and facts, which makes them a good proxy for non-experts to detect fake news by checking relevant expert opinions and comments.
• Therefore, in this paper, we present aedFaCT, a web browser extension that can help professionals and news readers perform fact-checking via the automatic discovery of expert opinions relevant to the news of concern via shared keywords.