eyeo partners with Factmata to develop the Trusted News browser extension

eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus, this month announced an investment and partnership with Factmata. Factmata will take over further development of eyeo’s Trusted News browser extension.

Trusted News browser extension (only available in Chrome) will alert users to hate speech, racism, sexism, bias, sensationalism, one-sidedness or deceptiveness in news articles, using Factmata’s proprietary language-analysis algorithms.

The Trusted News extension was first released in beta in late 2018. According to eyeo, the project was started by a small team driven to find a solution to the growing problem of fake news and hate speech online.

Trusted News leans on website blacklists from fact-checking organizations to generate its “fake news” ratings. Content based on facts and backed by primary sources is rated as trustworthy. If content contains politically-biased views that are not backed by facts or contains heavy elements of humor or exaggeration, it is rated as biased or satire. Misleading or false headlines for the purpose of enticing readers to visit a website purely for traffic or revenue are labeled as clickbait. Content that deliberately delivers threats to your computer or personal safety is marked as malicious.

eyeo says that by using Factmata’s unique “expert in the loop” approach to training machine learning algorithms, Trusted News and Factmata will be in a unique position to build a reliable, trust-able rating system for any piece of online content using an advanced, scalable AI that becomes more representative of what the crowd thinks over time.

“Our goal is to build a fair, explainable, open approach to rating content online, and not judge something to be of low credibility just because we don’t agree with the views of the website. We believe there are reasonable bounded indicators of good quality, balanced, trustworthy journalism. With enough time and training data, a well-built AI should be able to automatically detect writing that strays from these bounds, whilst leaving the final evaluation and critical opinion to the reader,” says Co-Founder and CEO, Dhruv Ghulati.