CheckMyNews

CheckMyNews

We have designed CheckMyNews to measure risks with AI-driven information targeting. For example, are there systemic biases in the quality of information different users receive on Facebook. Who is targeted with low-quality information? And what role do platform algorithms play in promoting low-quality information?

CheckMyNews also provides you with statistics about the news-related posts you see in your feed.

Help us hold online platforms accountable by installing our browser extension, which sends us information about the ads and posts you receive in your feed that refer to news articles. The data transfers are anonymous; we do not collect your name or any other identifiable information.

Installation

Sign the consent on the page that appears after installing the extension

Pin the extension to the chrome interface

Warning! If you are using some ad blocker like AdBlock Plus, you need to disable it on Facebook in order to get the most out of CheckMyNews. Also, It is not compatible with tracking protection settings, and third-party cookies should be allowed in your browser. Finally, you need to set your language in Facebook to Portuguese (Brazil), English (US) or French (France). Currently, we do not support other languages.

How does it work?

CheckMyNews works silently in the background while you are browsing Facebook without any overhead to your browsing experience. It analyzes the content you receive in Facebook to show you aggregate statistics about the ads and posts you receive from news organisations.

What data we collect from you:

  • Data about ads you receive while you browse Facebook
  • The accompanied explanations that Facebook provides
  • Data about posts you see on your timeline that are public or that refer to a news article
  • Periodically, your Ads Preferences page
  • Data about your activity on news sources websites
  • Hashed versions of your user id


How is my data going to be used

Your data is going to be used in our research, but only in an aggregated way. All traces of data are pseudonymized before they arrive on our servers.



Is my data going to be safe?

We will store your data in the servers of the Grenoble Computer Science Laboratory (LIGLAB) , protected by the LIGLAB firewall.

Statistics

Click on the popup menu of the extension to access the services we provide.

General statistics

See how many ads and posts from news organisations you receive on Facebook, and how do you interract with them.

Research

Here is the research we managed to produce thanks to data donations from users:

Who are we?