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Codebreaker

Read my lips. With your goggles.

Marc Sanchez Nov 23, 2011

If “my lips” are lying, truth goggles will let you know. Truth Goggles is a project that Dan Shultz, a Knight-Mozilla fellow for 2012, is working on to help you fact check political statements. This is one pair of goggles that you don’t wear; rather, as the Nieman Journalism Lab reports, Truth Goggles is:

software that flags suspicious claims in news articles and helps readers determine their truthiness. It’s possible because of a novel arrangement: Schultz struck a deal with fact-checker PolitiFact for access to its private APIs.

To be fair, the software can’t actually tell if someone is lying, that’s up to you. What it will do, is search PolitiFact’s database for words that show up in questionable statements, trying to help you figure out how true that statement is. It’s in the idea phase right now, but all the pieces are there. Shultz hopes to have the software up and running next year.

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