Some Brooklynites just got a grant to kill fake news

Work is getting underway to try to fix some of the worst parts of online life.

Brooklyn’s Francis Tseng joins former Brooklynite Caroline Sinders and Oaklander Susie Cagle to work on a new project called Viz Lab, which will work on getting to the bottom of memes.

The Viz Lab will develop “a dashboard to track and visualize images and ‘memes,’ as common sources of fake news, to enable journalists and researchers to more easily understand the origins of the image, its promoters, and where it might have been altered and then redistributed.”

ICYMI @susie_c, @frnsys, and myself are coming for all your memes: dank memes, weird memes, propaganda memes https://t.co/MgLxCQV98A

— caroline sinders (@carolinesinders) July 18, 2017

Tseng, Sinders and Cagle join 19 other technologists with their own projects, as part of a $1 million grant by the Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund and the Rita Allen Foundation to help suss out the problem of fake news.