COVID-19: IIT Bombay launches 'KauwaKaate' to verify fake news

A team of scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay has come out with a fact-checking platform, to help people differentiate between fake news and claims about COVID-19. 

The platform has been launched by the students and faculty of the department of computer science engineering. It is a part of a three-year project which is funded by the government of India.

On this platform, one can verify the news, articles, text messages on social media, pictures, and videos. The platform 'KauwaKaate' can be accessed through WhatsApp, mobile app and a web-interface. It can be downloaded onto an android phone. 

The fact-checking platform is also available at http://kkfactcheck.in/. The website mentioned that “The goals of the Kauwa Kaate project are broadly to combat the fake news epidemic that has affected the world today.”

To check if a piece of news or a viral forward message is authentic or not, one can send a query to 8369749660. Alternatively, they can also submit their queries for checking the veracity of news, pictures, articles or texts on either the mobile application or the website.

The query is extracted onto a dashboard, which users can access using a login.

Talking about the platform, Kameswari Chebrolu, associate professor, IIT Bombay said "once a query is received, it is checked if it has been previously checked on any of the predefined set of India-focused fact-checking websites or not. For images, exact matches are looked for, and if the fails a partial image match is done. If an article or image does not match either of the above cases, a few automated checks are done."

Explaining it further, she said, a check against a set of sites known to be biased on a particular topic (say politics) is done, then the user is told that their search article appears on such a site, and they should dig deeper and not necessarily accept it as is. The software should not remain open-sourced so that other people can pick it up and work on it.

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