* This probably won’t work…

Did Denzel Washington endorse Trump? Was a DNC staffer murdered so he wouldn’t meet with the FBI to testify against Hillary Clinton? Did Trump win the popular vote? Does cannabis cure cancer? The answer to all of these is no.

But you might have seen an article reporting these stories as fact: All are examples of fake news articles that have been shared on Facebook, or jumped to the top of Google’s news feed. […]

A team of students, including two University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign students, working out of HackPrinceton this weekend created FiB, a chrome extension that uses artificial intelligence to analyze and verify content shared on Facebook.

FiB works to combat fake news in two ways. First, the extension combs through a user’s Facebook news feed, verifying status updates, images and links using image recognition, keyword extraction, source verification and a Twitter search (to verify if a screenshot of a tweet is authentic). Based off the AI’s assessment of facts presented in the story, the extension will put a small tag in the corner indicating how factual a story is (such as “Verified” or “Not Verified”), and if the story turns out to be false, the AI will try to locate a more verified source of information on the topic. Second, if someone is about to post content, the extension will use the same verification process to see if someone is about to post unverified information. If so, a user is notified via chatbot and can choose to keep their post or discard it. The Chrome extension is currently available for download, and the project is open source.

Why won’t it work? Because the people who believe fake news stories are either too lazy or ill-informed to install the app or just don’t want to be told that the news they love is fake. Heck, I suspect that many already know the stories are fake and are doing their meanest best to spread the word to hurt the other side.

* I was a victim of this stuff. A tiny little publication that also posted on Facebook made repeated false claims a while ago that I was a former staffer for Speaker Madigan. I told them they were wrong, but didn’t get a response. Even Steve Brown told them they were wrong (not at my behest, by the way). They just kept writing it.

You will recall that Gov. Rauner himself bought into that claim and passed it along to reporters during a press conference. He apparently wanted to believe it so much that he didn’t bother checking.

Rauner spread that fake info when he was cornered by reporters about a column I’d written…

When informed that the online Capitol Fax reported a 1.4 percent return on the hypothetical implementation of the “Turnaround Agenda,” Rauner said blogger Rich Miller is “way, way wrong” and a former employee of House Speaker Mike Madigan (D-Chicago).

Except I didn’t use my numbers. I used Rauner’s numbers.

* From my column…

I sat down for an interview last week with Gov. Rauner. As with just about every reporter, Rauner blamed House Speaker Michael Madigan for stifling his beloved Turnaround Agenda. The governor said he was “frustrated” with Madigan for saying that his anti-union, pro-business reforms were “unrelated to the budget.”

“For example,” Rauner said, “if we can get business regulatory change so I can recruit manufacturers here and more transportation companies here, and more businesses here, we can generate billions of new revenue without raising tax rates. That’s directly tied to the budget.”

“Billions?” I asked.

“Billions,” he replied, while promising to send me a detailed analysis.

A few days later, his staff e-mailed me a memo that the governor had sent to lawmakers last fall. You can see it yourself at CapitolFax.com/turnaround.

But the memo didn’t really say much of anything about revenues, other than if the governor could get Illinois to “average” levels of unemployment and Gross State Product and if the governor could stop the migration of Illinoisans to other states, his agenda would produce a grand total of $510 million in additional revenues.

That ain’t “billions.” […]

And while $510 million seems like a lot of money, the governor’s projected revenue growth from his Turnaround Agenda would only be a 1.4 percent increase over the last state fiscal year.

Hence, “Gov. 1.4 percent.”

And would it even be that much? Rauner has said he would agree to higher state taxes if legislators agree to his Turnaround Agenda. But as a Republican legislative friend pointed out to me last week, that tax hike will reduce growth, even with all of Rauner’s agenda items.

That link with the Rauner memos is still active, so you can go check it out yourself.

To sum up, the governor used a fake news story to deny the validity of a very real story about numbers generated by his own staff for legislators and then sent to me at his own direction.

By the way, Rauner told reporters back then that he’d release updated economic projections. Never happened.

* I tried and failed to get Facebook to do something about that little fake news operation. Maybe now the company would listen, but I kinda doubt it.

Facebook and Google have to crack down hard on this stuff. And I do mean hard. But they can only do so much if the populace isn’t willing or able to act like citizens instead of lazy-minded, hyper-partisan consumers.