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B.S. Detector is a rejoinder to Mark Zuckerberg's dubious claims that Facebook is unable to substantively address the proliferation of fake news on its platform. A browser extension for both Chrome and Mozilla-based browsers, B.S. Detector searches all links on a given webpage for references to unreliable sources, checking against a manually compiled list of domains. It then provides visual warnings about the presence of questionable links or the browsing of questionable websites:
The B.S. Detector is powered by OpenSources, a professionally curated list of unreliable or otherwise questionable sources. We no longer maintain our own dataset. Neither the B.S. Detector nor the Self Agency LLC assume liability for the accuracy of OpenSources' data. To suggest or dispute a site's inclusion, file an issue with OpenSources.
Example domain classifications (in flux) include:
- Fake News: Sources that fabricate stories out of whole cloth with the intent of pranking the public.
- Satire: Sources that provide humorous commentary on current events in the form of fake news.
- Extreme Bias: Sources that traffic in political propaganda and gross distortions of fact.
- Conspiracy Theory: Sources that are well-known promoters of kooky conspiracy theories.
- Rumor Mill: Sources that traffic in rumors, innuendo, and unverified claims.
- State News: Sources in repressive states operating under government sanction.
- Junk Science: Sources that promote pseudoscience, metaphysics, naturalistic fallacies, and other scientifically dubious claims.
- Hate Group: Sources that actively promote racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination.
- Clickbait: Sources that are aimed at generating online advertising revenue and rely on sensationalist headlines or eye-catching pictures.
- Proceed With Caution: Sources that may be reliable but whose contents require further verification.
Click here to go to the Chrome Web Store and click 'Install.' The plugin is compatible with all Chromium browsers, including Opera (with the Chrome Extension extension).
Click here to go to the Firefox Add-ons Directory and click 'Add to Firefox.' Note: We are still awaiting the approval of the B.S. Detector by the Firefox Add-ons directory.
Support for Safari and Edge is on our roadmap. For now, you can use an older version of the B.S. Detector as a browser script. Install Tampermonkey for Safari, Edge, or any other available browser, then install the browser script here.
We welcome pull requests and community collaboration. Before contributing, please review our Code of Conduct. You can chat with other community members in realtime on Gitter here.
Check out our roadmap to see what we intend to integrate in future releases and to decide whether you'd like to help with one of those tasks, as they might be duplicative of new functionality you wish to propose. We don't want to squander your time or enthusiasm, so we recommend proposing new functionality in an issue or on Gitter before building something out we might not end up using. It will also provide you with an opportunity to hear from other community members who might help flesh out your ideas.
If you are planning to contribute, please work off and submit pull requests to the dev branch, which is the most current build. master is intended for public releases only and is usually several commits behind dev. Edit resources in ext and use gulp build to compile manually. Use gulp watch to compile automatically on file changes. The compiled, unpackaged extension will be in the build folder, which you can then load in your browser.