CheckMate - Your Move Against Misinformation
📰 AI-powered news analysis platform designed for convenience-seeking Singaporeans, advocating media literacy and critical reading of news.
- In the digital age, many Singaporeans get their news through online sources.
Misinformation spreads rapidly across social media and news aggregators, negatively impacting media literacy.
Problem: People find fact-checking time-consuming and complex as they lack accessible tools to verify news credibility.
Users want a quick, low-friction way to understand whether a piece of news is trustworthy, without needing to research multiple sources on their own.
🎯 Goal: Make news analysis simple and convenient so users can assess the credibility and tone of any article in just one click.
CheckMate Demo Video
❓ Why 3 platforms instead of one?
We built across 3 platforms to meet users where they already consume news:
Website for direct visits
Chrome extension for in-context analysis while browsing
Telegram bot for users who receive news through channels
A standalone app would require a behaviour change while embedding into existing habits lowered the friction to zero.
📊 In a survey of 30 users, 80% said they regularly receive or share news via Telegram channels (e.g The Straits Times channel) this validated our decision to build a Telegram bot rather than a standalone app, keeping users in a familiar context.
🚀 The Challenge:
Converting complex AI outputs from our API into user-friendly and clear visuals on our front-end UI.🚩 The Problem:
The raw API returned dense JSON — probability scores, correctness flags, and paragraph-long explanation strings. Meaningful signal was buried in technical noise that everyday readers couldn't parse.
💡 The Solution:
We translated the output into a tabbed interface: Summary, Facts, Sentiment, Emotion, and Propaganda. Each using colour-coded verdicts and concise English to summarise. A wall of complex outputs became a scannable dashboard, letting users get the key insight in seconds and drill deeper only if they wanted to.
🎮 Adding Gamification: Gamification wasn't just an engagement tactic, it addressed a core product problem: fact-checking tools teach users nothing. We wanted CheckMate to build media literacy skills over time, not just give answers. Hence, we shipped two game features to serve two different goals: skill-building and spreading awareness.
Suite of bite-sized games — Spot the Bias, Vibe Check, Gaslighting Guesser, and Propaganda Profiler. Each targeting a specific manipulation technique used in real news articles. The goal isn't to just entertain but to also build pattern recognition allowing users to catch techniques instinctively when reading the news.
The News Personality Quiz brings top-of-funnel awareness. Personality quizzes are highly shareable and popular amongst young Singaporeans, and a 'What kind of news reader are you?' result is far more likely to be posted online than a credibility score. It brings new users to the platform while reinforcing the message that how you consume news matters.
🧩 Brain Boosters builds the habit; the personality quiz brings new users in. Together they cover retention and acquisition, serving the same mission of making media literacy feel less like homework.