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Smart Reporting Tool Could Combat Fake News on Encrypted Chat Apps


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The sender, and the information within the suspect message, would only be revealed to a third party if the number of complaints about it crossed a threshold.

The Fuzzy Anonymous Complaint Tally System (FACTS) would allow users to report a message suspected of containing fake news without revealing its contents.

Credit: Getty Images

Researchers at George Washington University say they have built a tool that would allow users to expose fake news without endangering their privacy.

The Fuzzy Anonymous Complaint Tally System (FACTS) would let users report a message without disclosing its contents, and only decrypt the identity of the sender and message contents to a third party if the number of complaints about a single message exceeded a certain limit.

FACTS would prevent malefactors from falsely labeling messages as misinformation by logging complaints about messages, but not their contents, and automatically deciding if they match previous complaints so users could not report the same messages multiple times.

Said Alan Woodward at the U.K.'s University of Surrey, the tool "has the advantage that it is a scoring of complaints and doesn't involve requiring access to message content per se."

From New Scientist
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