NEW DELHI: Students of IIIT Delhi think they have an answer to the growing menace of fake news . They have developed an app called WhatsFarzi to slay hoaxes floating around social media.The app uses a custom logarithm that collates news on a particular topic from all sections and websites and verifies it with news on the same topic from an authentic and verified news portal. The app can also be used to verify photos for their authenticity.Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, associate professor at IIIT Delhi, told TOI that one of his PhD students who graduated in 2015 had analysed the spread of misinformation and fake content on Twitter and Facebook. With that research, a Goggle Chrome browser extension for Twitter was developed, and later an extension was developed for Facebook.The IIIT professor claimed that only last year, there were over 70 incidents in which over 30 people died “because of misinformation people received on WhatsApp”.“With this understanding, and seeing how lynchings have been taking place because of fake content spread on WhatsApp, we started working on an app from August last year to help combat the menace,” he said.Three students from the institute developed the app, which was released last week and is available at app stores.Suryatej Reddy, a third-year student, was among the developers. “To verify textual claims, we make use of a knowledge graph where we extract all the relevant entities which correspond to people, organisations, locations, products in the article and then update the graph with real news from credible sources and store it in a database for quick access. The elements are then run through articles from authentic news portals to verify,” Reddy said.

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