Verify as You Go: An LLM-Powered Browser Extension for Fake News Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sallami, Dorsaf, Aïmeur, Esma
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Sallami, Dorsaf
Aïmeur, Esma
author_facet Sallami, Dorsaf
Aïmeur, Esma
contents The rampant spread of fake news in the digital age poses serious risks to public trust and democratic institutions, underscoring the need for effective, transparent, and user-centered detection tools. Existing browser extensions often fall short due to opaque model behavior, limited explanatory support, and a lack of meaningful user engagement. This paper introduces Aletheia, a novel browser extension that leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to detect fake news and provide evidence-based explanations. Aletheia further includes two interactive components: a Discussion Hub that enables user dialogue around flagged content and a Stay Informed feature that surfaces recent fact-checks. Through extensive experiments, we show that Aletheia outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in detection performance. Complementing this empirical evaluation, a complementary user study with 250 participants confirms the system's usability and perceived effectiveness, highlighting its potential as a transparent tool for combating online fake news.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_05519
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Verify as You Go: An LLM-Powered Browser Extension for Fake News Detection
Sallami, Dorsaf
Aïmeur, Esma
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
Information Retrieval
The rampant spread of fake news in the digital age poses serious risks to public trust and democratic institutions, underscoring the need for effective, transparent, and user-centered detection tools. Existing browser extensions often fall short due to opaque model behavior, limited explanatory support, and a lack of meaningful user engagement. This paper introduces Aletheia, a novel browser extension that leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to detect fake news and provide evidence-based explanations. Aletheia further includes two interactive components: a Discussion Hub that enables user dialogue around flagged content and a Stay Informed feature that surfaces recent fact-checks. Through extensive experiments, we show that Aletheia outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in detection performance. Complementing this empirical evaluation, a complementary user study with 250 participants confirms the system's usability and perceived effectiveness, highlighting its potential as a transparent tool for combating online fake news.
title Verify as You Go: An LLM-Powered Browser Extension for Fake News Detection
topic Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05519