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Updated: Apr 01, 2020 18:46 IST

Highlights A team of scientists of IIT Bombay have launched a fact-checking platform

One can verify news articles, text messages on social media, pictures as well as videos using the platform

The platform is available via WhatsApp, mobile app and a web-interface

Amidst the coronavirus outbreak in the country, many fake news and rumours are doing the rounds. To dispel these rumours, a team of scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, have launched a fact-checking platform that helps you verify news or claims.

One can verify news articles, text messages on social media, pictures as well as videos using the platform which is available via WhatsApp, mobile app and a web-interface.

The ‘KauwaKaate’ fact-checking platform, as it is called, was developed by students and faculty of the department of computer science engineering. The website is available at http://kkfactcheck.in/ or the KauwaKaate Fact Checker application can be downloaded onto an android phone. It works for textual, image and video queries.

One can simply send a query to 8369749660 on WhatsApp asking if a viral or forwarded message is true. Alternatively, users can submit queries for checking the veracity of news, pictures, articles or texts on either the mobile application or the website.

The query is extracted onto a dashboard, which users can access using a log in.

“First we see if the item has been fact-checked previously by checking them against a predefined set of India-focused fact checking sites such as check4spam.com, boomlive.com, Alt News, and other leading news sites. We crawl these sites regularly and perform search on our server on the crawled data. For images, we look for exact matches, and if that fails we do a partial image match,” said Kameswari Chebrolu, associate professor, IIT Bombay. “If an article/image does not match either of the above cases, we have a few automated checks that we carry out,” she added.

The platform is a part of a three-year project funded by the government of India. The team plans to scale up operations and do more on automated checking. “For example, we wish to check against a set of sites known to be biased on a particular topic (say politics), and tell the user that their search article appears on such a site, and they should dig deeper and not necessarily accept it as is. We do not believe that the software should remain open-sourced so that other people can pick it up and work on it,” said Chebrolu.

The platform currently also provides additional features in the form of combining similar articles submitted by different users under the same task (task merging), identifying language, possible category of these articles, gathering existing evidence on the Internet via automated means and presenting the same in an organised fashion.