Only You Can Stop the Spread of Fake News

While our moderators will exercise their best judgment and cite sources wherever possible, we know that there is no acid test for fake news. This tool is not perfect, and indeed no such tool ever can be. It's also possible that you'll install This Is Fake and see nothing flagged save for the occasional story shared by your estranged uncle. The point is to find fake news where it is spread and reach out to the people in your timeline who are spreading it. We hope that by combining crowdsourcing with thoughtful human curation, we can improve upon or at least complement some other early efforts that either relied on static, third-party lists or used rudimentary artificial intelligence to tackle a problem that is probably too nuanced for A.I. to solve. We also know that Facebook and Google are working on various tools to disincentivize fake news on their platforms, although both have historically proved reticent to exercise human editorial judgment.