A new tool for reporting fake news is available since the beginning of the week in Brazil. Call of Healthy Internet Project (“Project for a Healthy Internet”, in free translation), the initiative consists of an extension for the Google Chrome browser, which allows s to report links, articles and other posts that contain false information or promote campaigns without fact checking. 3v6g72
The project was created by the organization TED (the same as “TED Talks”) and has the of Jigsaw (a disinformation incubator d with Alphabet, the same company that runs Google) and the International Center for Journalists (from the acronym in English: “ICFJ”). The text also emphasizes that Brazil is the first to have an open test of the tool, which should spread to other nations as the adoption of the mechanism progresses.
“It is no secret that there is a problem of misinformation and hate speech and division on the internet. One of the reasons for this is the real difficulty (or even impossibility) of tracking all harmful content posted online. In its decentralization, the internet has become a vast field in which everyone can contribute, although not always for the good.
Sérgio Spagnuolo, journalist, Knight Fellow of the ICFJ and founder of the data journalism agency Volt Data Lab
The initiative has a local partnership with the agency The Facts, the press consortium Check it out and the fact-checking blog Estadão Check, and it works very simply: the s the extension from the official Google Chrome store (or any browser that uses the “Chromium Engine”: more on that below) and goes through a short tutorial, which will teach you how to select one of the four desired options:
- promising ideas it does exactly what the name suggests, that is, it allows you to bring to the organizers of the Healthy Internet Project new ideas that improve the tool, whether technological or information-checking practices;
- Lies or manipulation it is the most direct category, which allows you to report posts that contain deliberately false information, ing that “fake news” is not only the responsibility of those who create them, but also those who share them;
- Abuse or harassment determines opinionated publications that bring a prejudiced tone: comments of racism, prejudice towards LGBTQIA+ public groups or xenophobia, for example, fall into this category;
- division or fear protects complaints against posts inciting actions that divide the population into agendas where the best is unity. Publications that extol police violence without justification, for example, can be cataloged here.
Each of the four categories above has three degrees of severity (“Minimum”, “Medium” and “Severe”), selectable by clicking on the corresponding icon. After this short tutorial (it seems like a lot, but it doesn't take more than two minutes and even has an example of a “test report” for you to get the hang of it). With that, you are now ready to mark links with the tool, which is very simple to do. Did you see an article from a suspicious or politically biased blog? Go to the page in question and click on the extension icon (usually located in the upper right corner of your browser) and determine the category, severity and add annotations and hashtags where appropriate.
Healthy Internet Project: Only in Chrome? 1i3d42
While the Healthy Internet Project announcement post specifically mentions the Chrome extension store, our testing shows that it works fine on any browser that uses the same code as Google's browser.
Explaining: Chrome is developed by a engine (literal translation: “engine”) called Chromium. Unlike other browsers, however, this technology is shared and free for use by other companies. Basically, this means that several browsers — some well-known — make use of it.
Some examples include:
- Microsoft Edge
- Opera Browser
- Vivaldi Browser
- Brave Browser
- Epic Browser
- by naitCON.com
- IronBrowser
In all, there are at least 34 known browsers — among open solutions, mobile (Samsung's smartphone browser is a case) and exclusive to software vendors (when you open a link through the antivirus and it opens the page without leaving the program, for example), apart from another 12 to 15 that were discontinued over time. The project Healthy Internet Project works on all major ones: at Showmetech, for example, we installed it on a computer equipped with Opera.
The interesting thing is that the project does not collect any information from the , not even stipulating the sending of an email, registration or any form of . So all its use is focused on privacy and, consequently, anonymous.
“A lot can be done with the data that people will help to build, like what happens in initiatives like Wikipedia. For example, a journalist can produce a fact-checking story, an organization can research what conversations are happening in the darkest corners of the web, and create training for communities, and tech companies can remove abusive posts, in line with their standards and policies.” .
Sérgio Spagnuolo, journalist, Knight Fellow of the ICFJ and founder of the data journalism agency Volt Data Lab
Source: IJNet; Healthy Internet Project (extension page)
