SurfSafe is a browser extension intended to help viewers spot fake news, in the form of altered or misleadingly used images. It is currently available for Google Chrome and Opera. RoBhat Labs, a company founded by two undergraduates at University of California, Berkeley, who had previously developed software that identified bot accounts on Twitter. It was released in August 2018 after a presentation at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The creators liken it to antivirus for Internet users' news feeds.
The extension works by comparing images that appear in the browser to a database of images culled from a hundred trusted news or fact-checking sites, such as Time and Snopes.com. If an image has been altered or has been identified as being used to mislead elsewhere online, a pop-up informs the reader of this. SurfSafe has already received recognition by universities who provide resources to students on how to avoid fake news, such as the University of Akron School of Law.
While SurfSafe has been well-received, it has also been criticized for limited effectiveness and for being a technological solution to a human problem. Neal Krawetz, an expert in network security and image analysis, has gone further, not only saying that SurfSafe does not come anywhere near doing what it claims, but recommending against installing it due to privacy concerns.
History
In 2017, Ash Bhat and Rohan Phadte, both undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley, began developing online tools to help combat the spread of misinformation on the Internet. The first, NewsBot, was an app for Facebook Messenger that attempts to identify the political leanings in a news story. The second, BotCheck.me, was developed as an extension for Google Chrome. It uses machine learning and natural language processing to assess the probability that a Twitter account is a bot spreading political propaganda. Users who installed it saw a button on every Twitter account's page that they could click to determine the probability it was a bot.
Within a year of its deployment, BotCheck had managed to flag almost a million accounts as bots. Bhat and Phadte believed that their model, which attempted to identify and differentiate between human and bot posting patterns, had achieved a 93.5% accuracy rate. But at the same time they had noticed another problem: Many of the bots were sharing altered images to support their positions, and it was hard to identify them. The problem was compounded by the use of unaltered images that were represented as being about something other than what they depicted.
In response to that problem, Bhat and Phadte developed SurfSafe. With the extension enabled, a user can hover their mouse over a photograph; it will then be compared to others in a data base of hashes of all the images on every page any browser with the extension has visited and those hosted on a list of a hundred websites considered to be trusted sources. RoBhat believes that if it can get several hundred thousand users to install SurfSafe it will, through this method, accumulate a data base of a hundred billion images within a year. It also analyzes any text on the page and compares it with text on pages where the image has also appeared. Users can also click on a button if they believe the picture has been manipulated or misleadingly used.
Once SurfSafe has done those comparisons and searches, it will then place an icon at the corner: a check mark if the image appears to be genuine, a warning sign if it might be suspect, and an X if it has been identified elsewhere as altered; in the latter instance it also shows the original image. Other than Snopes.com, users may select their own group of websites, mostly those of major news organizations, from which to check content.
RoBhat's founders introduced SurfSafe at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June 2018. Two months later they made it available to the public. At the time, it was only available for Google Chrome;
Criticism
While much of the initial news coverage of SurfSafe was positive, at least expressing approval of the idea behind the extension, even some of those reviewers were skeptical that SurfSafe (and some other competing products) could solve the problem all by itself. Wired noted that the underlying problem is digital literacy. "It's a bit of a leap to expect someone whose main window to the internet is Facebook to take the additional step of installing a fact-checking plug-in." Nor was the extension available for any mobile platform, although RoBhat said it was working on that.