Fighting fake news and misinformation.

Developing a tool, that can be accessed online, to verify the truthfulness of a web article or a social media post. 

Ghassan Maslamani, founder of http://zaat.dev 

The spread of misinformation/fake news has a huge implication on how people respond, which might lead to them not follow the restriction e.g. opt-out from wearing a mask or rejecting the vaccination. 

At the current stage, the first goal is to build a tool that Arabic native speakers can use to verify the truthfulness of a social media post or an article. So the target audience can be anyone who speaks Arabic and wants to validate something they stumbled upon on the web. If we succeeded in building that then the next goal would be to support another language. 

Providing a free tool for people to verify the content of an article or social media post.   

By raising public awareness of the general public, they would act more responsibly thus saving the life, when awareness is critical. like in a pandemic. 

It would have an impact on all people who are native in Arabic and have access to an internet connection of around +120 Million based on the below study*. 

*Please note this study was made 5 years ago, so the number is definitely higher. 

Study Arabic internet users

There are two types of metrics, first technological threshold, which can be measured by how accurate the machine learning model is. On other hand, other essential metrics that can measure  the impactfulness of the tool (after it has been deployed) can be the number of visitors or the number of requests (usage). 

Please note, usage metrics are relevant after only the tool is deployed, and is available to the public. i.e. after passing the threshold of the first metric. 

For developing the tool: 
The main barrier is time, developing this tool requires a great amount of researching, learning, and testing...etc. That being said I can put time on it unless I have a steady income. 

I am the founder of Zaatdev OU, a firm for developing customized apps. you can visit the website to learn more https://zaat.dev. 

To break the financial barriers of developing the solution. And why I am working on the solution, is simply because I am interested in rising the general public awareness. 

It would be very helpful to partner with any research department focused on NLP research, for example, Christopher Manning the lead instructor of the CS224N class at Stanford can be very helpful, to get insight from.