This Startup Wants To Help Readers Fact-Check Every Detail In An Article

In 2014, Rap Genius made some major changes, got rid of one of its cofounders, and rebranded itself as Genius.

A crowdsourced annotation platform, Genius originally let users analyze rap lyrics. In recent months, the startup has broadened its horizons, letting users annotate everything from literature and poetry to legal documents.

Interestingly, Genius also lets you put genius.com in front of any URL so you can annotate it. There's a number of use-cases for this, but yesterday on Twitter, Andreessen Horowitz general partner Balaji S. Srinivasan pointed out one specific example of how to use it: this will make fact-checking news articles a breeze.

You don't need a plug-in to use it, either. It's as easy as opening up the webpage with "genius.com" in front of the URL, finding a factual error, annotating it, and tweeting it out. Srinivasan thinks this could be a game-changer for collaborative and distributed fact-checking.

Here's how it looks when you annotate a news article using Genius:

 Pretty cool!