WWW Community Notes

Teachers, students, and vulnerable groups are at high risk of being targets for misinformation in the internet age. We must create a platform to keep news/information transparent using our community.

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Inspiration

Twitter (now X) is one of our biggest inspiration for our community notes. Their innovative take on integrating the community to support honestly and transparency on their platform made us wonder... could we do this for the whole internet? Many news sites spew clickbait and rage inducing new articles in an attempt to gain clicks and views. I believe that with the support of a community we can combat this spreading of misinformation and depolarizing the internet!

What it does

Our chrome web extension allows for users to open it up on any website and based on the url and what they are looking at on the screen, compile the community's corrections and reviews for the news article, youtube video, or anything else on the web! This allows for users to look to other sources (such as their fellow community members) and gain more information on a website and whether the information on it is false or not.

Users can also leave their own notes to inform other members of WWW Community Notes of websites spreading fake news.

How we built it

We used ReactJS as our frontend framework to make the chrome web extension which we then tested and deployed using developer settings in chrome extensions! We created the database of notes and websites using Firebase and authentication is also handled using Firebase's FireAuth.

Challenges we ran into

We had some trouble deciding the how the data we were going to save should be structured in order to be optimized to load quickly and update quickly. Also, implementing the dynamic UI to reflect the user's changes also gave us some challenges on how to handle user interactions!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are so proud of WWW Community Notes, we truly believe that the force of a community for good can help revolutionize the polarizing nature of the internet. Our implementation of Firebase and our data retrieval protocols proved to be quick and efficient as well. Overall, our project was challenging yet rewarding as we are glad to have created something that works quite well to provide context to websites for users.

What we learned

We learned a lot about URL structure and website structure as we had to parse URLs to obtain the web-pages saved to our Firebase database. We also learned quite a bit about user interaction flows as well as data architecture as all our data types were made in house by us.

What's next for WWW Community Notes

We do not think the fight for a transparent internet free of misinformation is close to over. We plan to take this project to greater heights and deploying it so all people on the internet can use it and stay informed. We also have so many more ideas, such as algorithms to find the most useful comment, to UI updates and better user interaction flows. However, aside from all the improvements, the development of this extension can be a critical stepping stone to halting the spread of misinformation on the internet.

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