A Web Tool That Lets People Choose Their Own ‘Sources of Truth’
Two 21-year-olds believe they have a way to bring consumers of unreliable news closer to objectivity.
In a world where the most famous dorm-room-born internet company has developed a reputation as a matrix of fake users and misleading posts, Ash Bhat and Rohan Phadte are hoping that the answer to online disinformation could come out of their own college apartment.
Bhat and Phadte, both 21, are the founders of, an app for Facebook Messenger that aims to identify the political leaning of a given news piece. The second is , a Chrome extension that uses machine learning and natural language processing to rate whether Twitter accounts are likely to be fabricated bots. In less than a year, Botcheck.me has flagged nearly 1 million accounts as probable bots.
