And just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday!
As you have probably heard by now, word has it that our radical Muslim president is doing all sorts of terrible things to our country! He's gotten rid of our National Christmas Tree, abolished the National Day of Prayer, and put the family's dog, Bo, on his own airplane all to himself.
No? Then you must not have some distant (or close!) relation who loves to forward, forward, forward, all the live-long day. But for the rest of us, whose inboxes' factual sanctity is under constant assault, there's LazyTruth, a new tool from Matt Stempeck and his team at MIT's Media Lab.
LazyTruth is a plug-in for Chrome that automatically scans email for information that FactCheck.org and Politifact have deemed false. If something doesn't check out, it'll provide a few words of correction and a link to where you can find out more. You can then easily pass that verified information on to the email's sender. Down the road Stempeck plans to add more kinds of rumors to LazyTruth's filter -- urban myths, hoaxes, false security threats, etc. -- but for now the tool is limited to political tall tales.
"Put simply," Stempeck explained over email (all of which checked out), "LazyTruth is a bridge between low quality information (chain emails) and high quality information (the research outlets that debunk chain emails)." By putting the fact-checking right in your inbox with the forwarded junk, LazyTruth reduces the friction (catch-all phrase for time and effort) between you and a politely worded correction.