EVERYONE has a gullible friend or a crazy uncle, who not only believes every urban myth but also insists on forwarding it to you. Now there鈥檚 a weapon to fight spam 鈥� an automatic fact-checker called built into your email.
鈥淲e get a lot of crap in our inboxes,鈥� says Matt Stempeck, one of the researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, who came up with the software and unveiled it at its spring conference last week.
Wild rumours 鈥� such as the myth that Barack Obama is a Muslim 鈥� do the rounds for years, even though they have been repeatedly debunked. LazyTruth aims to combat this by delivering kernels of truth right to your inbox. When it recognises the unique phrases that turn up in viral emails it displays a rebuttal sourced from fact-checking websites such as and .
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The tool鈥檚 creators plan to experiment with different configurations to find the most effective. For example, including a link to another article might engage more people. Or it might be better to embed one succinct passage that debunks the entire email. The team will gauge effectiveness based on how many LazyTruth users send responses to fact-challenged emailers.
