Khabardar – a Browser Extension that Cautions you against Unreliable News Sources

Browser extensions are found in variety of forms along with their own specialties. It is most likely in a way that program expansions are found in numerous in number. But, a group of Nepalese people are here with their own approach in developing a browser extension. ‘Khabardar’, this word is not only limited to the typical Nepali word. It is a browser extension that cautions you against unreliable news sources. It was developed by the group of innovative minds, the Parewa Labs team.

Khabardar works using a series of filters. Every filter scans the site for signs that would demonstrate a questionable wellspring of data. It basically focuses on three areas. It involves age filter, blog filter and crowdsourced blacklist. Age filter filters the sites in a way that the sites that are not exactly a year are the most questionable and ought not to be trusted. Similarly, blog filter filters the blogs hosted on blogging networks like blogspot and tumblr pretending to be news sites. Likewise, crowed sourced blacklist is the list of untrusted sites that are known to spread false and fake news.

One of the Co- founder of Parewa Labs, Mr.Punit Jajodia said, “After the devastating earthquake in April 2015, many websites spawned that were spreading false news and rumors. They had misleading titles and people would share them on social media. The Cyber Crime Department has strict laws against such acts but they have been unsuccessful in curbing such fake news sites.”

He added, “It is very hard for most people to identify a reliable news source from a fake one, but I found that such websites have some common properties – most of them were less than a year old – most of them were hosted on blogging sites like blogspot, tumblr etc. – there weren’t too many of these but due to extensive sharing on social media, they were highly visible.”

Thus, it was then the Parewa Labs team decided to create a browser extension that would warn the users again such unreliable news sources.

The team is planning to translate the messages that are in English into Nepali very soon. Not just this, overviewing the small blacklist till date, they are planning to develop such criteria where the user can contribute to the list so that it even becomes easier to find any website spreading false news. Likewise, the team is planning to collaborate with Cyber Crime Department so that they can come up with a policy on punishing the people behind the false and untrustworthy websites.

It is said that “Necessity is the mother of all invention”, in a way or other can be related with this approach of the Parewa Labs team. With a vision of filtering the false sites and providing the readers an authentic information, the team has set up its way towards helping the people around. Not limiting into a small extension, it has various plans and policies so that they can widen up their effort throughout Nepal.

For further details: https://khabardar.github.io/