Polish Press Agency (PAP) has published #FakeHunter app for Android and iOS. It allows users to report and search for potential fake news via your mobile device.
The app is a next step in the development of PAP’s tool which allows to look for false information about the coronavirus in the Web. In the middle of April a browser plug-in was released. It allows to easily report potential fake news. The website fakehunter.pap.pl is a platform where the credibility of reported news can be verified. Later, in July, a Messenger chatbot FakeHunter started to operate.
Creation of these tools is a natural response to the infodemic – the phenomenon of flooding the Internet with fake news, which has been following the coronavirus pandemic since March and is still intensifying.
‘We assumed that this phenomenon should be counteracted’, said the president of the board of PAP, Wojciech Surmacz, who underlines that the Internet users decide which content is filtered. And that is what distinguish the PAP’s portal from other similar projects.
‘I would like to develop the whole project in this direction. To engage people to fight fake news. To make so they catch them. It teaches them the vigilance and educates in the subject’, Surmacz added.
In the beginning the project focused on the information related to the Covid-19 pandemic. In July such bookmarks as Finances, Science, Health and Telecommunication were added to the portal.
The creators of the project want it to cover all the subject areas. Next step will be to create the English version of the portal.
#FakeHunter and all of actions within its frames are the result of cooperation between PAP and GovTech and social partners of the project. The new app can be downloaded from AppStore (iOS) and Google Play (Android).
WP / source: PAP
