THE TRUTH GAZETTE — Fake News Detector

Tagline: A student-built, AI-powered investigative mini-newspaper for spotting false claims. Built solo, polished, and ready to work.

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🔎 Overview

The Truth Gazette helps students, teachers, and community members quickly assess short claims, headlines, URLs, and images. It uses server-side prompt engineering with a generative model (Gemini) and server-side trusted source grounding to produce:

• A verdict: REAL / FAKE / UNCERTAIN
• Confidence % (human-readable explanation)
• A short investigation report divided into readable paragraphs
• Key findings and a list of authoritative clickable sources (government, research orgs, academic journals). Community-driven sites (e.g., Reddit, Quora) are used only for internal cross-checks and are never exposed in the public sources list.

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✨ Features

• Text, URL, and image inputs (image OCR for text-in-image claims)
• Structured, human-readable JSON output from the model (verdict, confidence, sources)
• Server-side proxy for API calls (no keys in the frontend)
• Upstash-based rate limiting, caching, and daily quota support (server-side)
• Source filtering to show only authoritative public sources
• A "lights-out" flashlight easter egg (Shift+L)

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🛠️ Development (local)

1. Install dependencies:

   cd TruthGazette
   npm ci

2. Start the dev server (Vercel CLI recommended):
   • vercel dev --listen 3000 (requires Vercel CLI)
   • or run your preferred serverless dev environment
3. Run tests (against your running dev server):

   TEST_BASE_URL=http://localhost:3000 npm test

Notes:

• The frontend no longer contains API keys. All AI calls must go through /api/investigate which reads keys from environment variables on the server.
• The client sends an X-Session-Id header (stored in localStorage) to enable session-based rate limiting. Optionally set REQUIRE_SESSION_ID=1 in staging/production to require session IDs for all requests.

Environment variables used:

• GEN_API_KEY, GEN_MODEL (required for model access)
• UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL, UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN (optional, enable server-side rate limiting)
• REQUIRE_SESSION_ID (optional, set to 1 to enforce session header)
• DAILY_QUOTA (optional, default 200)
• RATE_LIMIT_PER_MIN (optional, default 20)
• ALLOW_TEST_HEADERS (optional, set to 1 to allow X-TEST-RL-LIMIT header for local tests)
• RUN_RATE_LIMIT_TEST (used by test harness to run the rate-limit test)
• You can run the test harness in test/run_tests.js to validate behavior for the test cases in TEST_CASES.md.
• The test runner also checks for accidental hardcoded keys in front-end files within this directory to prevent leaks.

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📑 License & contributing

• Licensed under the MIT License (see LICENSE).
• If you'd like to contribute or adapt, follow CONTRIBUTING.md.

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