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

Abstract: 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 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.