Info.friend | Devpost

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Chat screen
News articles with their bias and credibility ratings

Inspiration

We were inspired by the real-world events that were happening. Around this time a lot of disinformation is being shared, and there is a huge distrust towards media from the masses. News, among all other means, has grown to become one of the most influential carriers of motivated propaganda. According to The Telegraph, fake news is now seen as one of the greatest threats to democracy, free debate, and the Western order. Each news source is targeting a specific demographic through their information while slandering another group to increase the differences. We need to make up our own minds about an issue by putting aside preconceived notions and emotionalism and looking at it from different angles.

What it does

Info.friend is a chatbot that responds to the user’s questions about real-world happenings by returning answers as a list of news articles with their bias and credibility ratings. The chatbot library we found uses Machine Language models to be able to parse English sentences and scrape data off of the various news sources automatically. Our app will take your query and check references from our database to see if the news source is credible or not, and displays those articles with annotated data of bias and factuality ratings.

How we built it

The front-end consists of Flutter. It was an easy choice as it allows us to compile to any platform anytime if we so chose. Its ease of developing UI certainly helps too. The backend code consists of using Firebase for the ML chatbot model, as well as a database for bias and credibility rating details we have for news sources we have data on.

Challenges we ran into

For some of us, it was a new experience using Flutter to do UI. It was tough getting used to the widget structure of the code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the Flutter app that we created as this is our first working Flutter project for most of us. We learned a lot about creating UI elements in Flutter and how to host a web app on Firebase. Finally, we are happy that we can create a web app that can actually help people figure out trusted news articles.

What we learned

-for most of us it was the first Hackathon, also the first time using Flutter. -sharing our ideas and how to collaborate to reach our goal. -challenging ourselves by learning new skills in a short amount of time. -how to put our skills to work in a quick-turn environment.