Social media platforms are often urged to fight the spread of misinformation through content moderation, but two MIT-affiliated researchers are proposing an alternative: empowering users themselves to identify which information sources are trustworthy.
The Trustnet browser extension, built by EECS professor David Karger and Farnaz Jahanbakhsh, SM ’21, PhD ’23, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, works for content on any website, including news aggregators and video-streaming platforms as well as social media sites.
Users click a button to open a side panel where they label content as accurate or inaccurate or question its accuracy, and they can identify other sources whose assessments are trustworthy. Then, when the user visits a website that contains assessments from these sources, the side panel automatically pops up to show them. The extension also checks all links on the page a user is reading. If trusted sources have assessed content on any linked pages, the extension indicates as much and fades the links to content deemed inaccurate.
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