Students only needed 36 hours to solve Facebook's fake news problem

Facebook has been struggling to keep fake news stories from infiltrating its trending sections and off people's newsfeeds. But it turns out all the social media giant had to do was work with some student programmers who found a way to sniff out fake news sites in just 36 hours.

The group of four students, including Nabanita De, who spoke to Mashable Friday, buckled down during a three-day hackathon event at Princeton University last week. They came up with a Chrome browser extension appropriately called FiB.

De said the idea struck her as she was on the bus to Princeton from UMass Amherst, where she is a grad student. The 22-year-old spoke with her hackathon teammates Anant Goel, 18, Qinglin Chen, 20, and Mark Craft, 19, about finding a way to tackle fake information that spreads through Facebook. Read more...