BS Detector Warns of Fake News Sites

Internet is full of fake news sites like The Onion and Weekly World News that have been amusing people for decades now. The Onion was launched back in 1996 and by now everyone knows that whatever is published on their website cannot be taken for the truth. But there are newer sites popping up trying to imitate The Onion and younger generation having no knowledge of the confusing nature of the internet often start believing the news articles published on these sites. In fact, I remember someone making a phone call to a radio station during a live show and complaining about something they had read on such a fake news website. The radio show host had to explain the caller that the website he was referring to was in fact a satire web site and the news article was bogus.

Now someone has created a browser extension to warn you of such news sites that could publish completely fake news articles, articles that are biased, articles that are promoted by a state agency, conspiracy news, junk science news, hate group sites and more. The extension is called BS Detector and is available for Google Chrome through Chrome Web Store. There are also unofficial extensions available for Firefox (not through Mozilla add-ons repository) and the Greasemonkey script for all the other web browsers.

BS Detector

The extension checks the website domain that you are visiting and all the links on the webpages you open. Then it cross-checks these domain names against a list of domains stored on GitHub and warns you if the domain names match. The list contains more than a thousand domain names categorized based on the why these sites are considered fake news.

Conclusion: BS Detector can warn you of some of the unreliable sources of news that are often shared through Facebook and Twitter. This can save your time that you could have wasted reading about imaginary news events.

You can find more information about BS Detector http://bsdetector.tech/.