TruthLab

TruthLab is a fake-news verification web application. It combines a React frontend with a Flask API that can classify submitted news text or article URLs using a saved scikit-learn model and TF-IDF vectorizer.

Features

• User signup and login with JWT-based authentication.
• Optional Google OAuth login flow.
• News verification from direct text or a URL.
• Verification history for authenticated users.
• FAQ question submission.
• Issue report submission.
• MongoDB-backed persistence for users, verification history, FAQ questions, and reports.

Tech Stack

Frontend

• React 19
• Vite
• React Router
• Tailwind CSS
• Lucide React icons

Backend

• Python Flask
• Flask-JWT-Extended
• Flask-Bcrypt
• Flask-CORS
• PyMongo
• scikit-learn and joblib
• BeautifulSoup and requests for URL article extraction

Project Structure

TruthLab/
|-- backend/
|   |-- app.py
|   |-- models.py
|   |-- requirements.txt
|   |-- middleware/
|   |-- model/
|   |   |-- fake_news_model.pkl
|   |   `-- tfidf_vectorizer.pkl
|   `-- routes/
`-- frontend/
    |-- package.json
    |-- vite.config.js
    |-- public/
    `-- src/

Prerequisites

• Node.js and npm
• Python 3.10 or newer
• MongoDB Atlas database or a compatible MongoDB instance

Backend Setup

From the project root:

cd backend
python -m venv .venv
.\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
pip install -r requirements.txt

Create a .env file in backend/:

MONGO_URI=mongodb+srv://<user>:<password>@<cluster>/<database>?retryWrites=true&w=majority
GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID=
GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET=
GOOGLE_REDIRECT_URI=http://127.0.0.1:5000/auth/google/callback
FRONTEND_URL=http://localhost:5173

Run the API:

python app.py

The backend runs at:

http://127.0.0.1:5000

Frontend Setup

Open a second terminal from the project root:

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

The Vite development server usually runs at:

http://localhost:5173

API Endpoints

Auth

• POST /auth/signup
• POST /auth/login
• GET /auth/google/login
• GET /auth/google/callback

Verification

• GET /verify/health
• POST /verify/predict
• GET /verify/history

POST /verify/predict accepts either:

{
  "text": "Article or headline text"
}

or:

{
  "url": "https://example.com/news-article"
}

FAQ

• POST /faq/submit-question

Reports

• POST /report/submit-report

Useful Commands

Frontend:

npm run dev
npm run build
npm run lint
npm run preview

Backend:

python app.py

Notes for Maintainers

• backend/models.py imports python-dotenv, but python-dotenv is not currently listed in backend/requirements.txt.
• backend/routes/faq_routes.py and backend/routes/report_routes.py contain hardcoded MongoDB connection strings. Move these to environment variables before sharing or deploying the project.
• backend/routes/verify_routes.py imports utils.text_cleaner, but no backend/utils/text_cleaner.py file is currently present in the repository.
• backend/routes/admin_routes.py imports model.user_model, but that module is not currently present in the repository.
• frontend/src/App.js uses PrivateRoute, but it is not currently imported or defined.
• The login, signup, and verification form UI currently appears to be mostly static; some frontend components do not yet call the backend API.

Watch Demo

TruthLab - Project Demo