Surfsafe is a browser extension that compares all the images you load in your browser to images that appear on “trusted news sites,” fact-checking services, and Snopes, and pops up a tool-tip warning when you hover over known hoax images with links to more information.
The tool comes from Robhat Labs, who created the Botcheck.me extension, which predicts whether the accounts you operate with on Twitter are operated by bots or humans.
Though the tool only spots known fakes, the creators say this is an acceptable limitation, since their goal is to the stop the viral spread of fake news, which is, by definition, widely dispersed and thus likely to appear in the database of fakes.
When a user hovers over a photo, SurfSafe scans the entire database of fingerprints to see if it’s ever encountered that image before in its raw or doctored form. If it has, it instantly surfaces the other images on the right side of the screen, prioritizing the earliest instance of the image, as it’s most likely to be the original. Users then have the ability to flag the image as either propaganda, Photoshopped, or misleading, which helps inform the SurfSafe model going forward.
This Browser Extension Is Like an Anti-Virus for Fake Photos [Issie Lapowsky/Wired]