TruePulse – AI-Powered News Verification Tool

TruePulse is an intelligent web application designed to combat misinformation by providing a comprehensive analysis of news articles. It helps users verify the authenticity of online content through AI-powered classification, sentiment analysis, and external source verification.

How It Works

TruePulse analyzes a news article from a given URL through the following steps:

1. URL Input: The user provides a link to a news article.
2. Text Extraction: The Flask backend scrapes the article's text content using BeautifulSoup.
3. AI Analysis: A FakeNewsClassifier class, leveraging Hugging Face Transformers, performs two key tasks:
   • Fake News Detection: Classifies the article as "Real" or "Fake."
   • Sentiment Analysis: Determines the sentiment of the text (e.g., Positive, Negative, Neutral).
4. External Verification: The application fetches related articles from trusted sources using the News API to provide external context and verification.
5. Trust Score Calculation: A trust score is generated based on the AI classification, source domain reputation, and external verification.
6. Display Results: The React frontend presents a detailed report including the classification, reasoning, sentiment, key topics, and a list of related articles.

Key Features

• AI-Powered Classification: Determines if an article is likely real or fake with a confidence score.
• Comprehensive Analysis: Provides sentiment analysis, key topic extraction, and detailed reasoning for the classification.
• Trust Score: Offers a simple, at-a-glance credibility metric (0-100).
• External Verification: Fetches related articles from trusted news outlets to help users fact-check and cross-reference information.
• Modern UI: A clean, user-friendly interface for seamless interaction.

Project Setup and Execution

This project consists of a Python (Flask) backend and a React (Vite) frontend. For the best experience, run each in a separate terminal.

Prerequisites

• Backend: Python 3.8+
• Frontend: Node.js 18+ and npm

1. Clone the Repository

git clone https://github.com/sumesh-singh/TruePulse.git
cd TruePulse

2. Set Up and Run the Backend

# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run the server
python app.py

The backend will be available at http://localhost:5000.

3. Set Up and Run the Frontend

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Run the development server
npm run dev

The frontend will be accessible at http://localhost:8080 or a similar port.

4. Environment Variables

To fetch related articles, the application requires a News API key. You can set it as an environment variable.

• Windows:

  set NEWS_API_KEY=your_key_here
  

• macOS/Linux:

  export NEWS_API_KEY=your_key_here
  

Get a free key from newsapi.org.