A Laravel web platform for publishing official news and receiving user reports on suspicious content, reviewed by editors who publish corrections linked to the fake item.
The Official News Platform for Combating Fake News is an academic project carried out by a team of students with technical assistance from Techno Enjaz. It aims to build an official news reference for post-liberation Syria, through which the competent authorities publish verified news and correct misleading claims. The platform lets users report suspicious external content (a link, text, or images); a team of editors verifies it and then publishes an official post that confirms or debunks the claim, linking the fake news item to its correction so the reader gets the full context.
The platform is built with the Laravel framework, PHP, and a relational MySQL database, with HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, and JavaScript interfaces that support Arabic and right-to-left layout, plus separate dashboards for editors and the system administrator. Verification in the implemented version relies on human review by editors; the platform does not include AI-based automatic fake news detection, which is listed as a future development.
| Item | Details |
|---|---|
| Project type | Web platform for publishing official news, managing reports, and editorial verification |
| Field | Fact-checking, digital content management, web development |
| Project status | Academic working prototype documented with implemented interfaces and dashboards |
| Techno Enjaz role | Technical support and assistance to the students during project development |
| Core technologies | Laravel (MVC), PHP, MySQL, XAMPP and Apache, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JavaScript |
| Outputs | Official news site, report form with image attachments, linking fake news to corrections, search by keyword and governorate, editor and admin dashboards |
The project starts from the observation that fake news and misinformation spread faster and wider on social media than true news, making it hard for citizens to tell truth from falsehood and eroding their trust in media and government institutions. The risk is greater in post-conflict regions: in the Syrian context, old images and videos, or footage from other places, were circulated as current events, and after the conflict such content can stir up tensions and hinder reconciliation, the return of refugees, and reconstruction efforts.
The project argues that relying on independent fact-checkers alone is not enough, because their corrections often arrive after the damage is done. It therefore proposes a direct official channel, run by authorized bodies, to publish confirmed news and debunk rumors quickly, while involving citizens as first-line reporters of suspicious content.
The project was carried out academically by the students, with technical assistance and support from Techno Enjaz during development. It is presented among the office's work as an example of its support for web platforms that combine content management, editorial workflows, and role-and-permission systems.
A report moves through a clear editorial pipeline from submission to the official response:
The use-case diagram defines four actors in a hierarchical inheritance relationship, where each role inherits the permissions of the role below it:
| Role | Permissions |
|---|---|
| Guest | View posts and news, search by keyword or governorate, view site information, sign up and log in |
| Registered user | Edit profile, report questionable content, view own reports, add or remove posts from favorites |
| Editor / content checker | Create and edit official posts and manage their media, review reports, set post status, link a fake post to its correction post |
| System administrator | Manage users and their roles (CRUD), manage governorates and regions, manage site information (About and contact details) |
The database was first drafted, then modeled as an entity-relationship diagram (ERD), and implemented with Laravel Migrations following normalization principles. A key design decision is that a report is no longer tied to a post inside the platform; it represents external content and carries a resolution_post_id field pointing to the official post that resolved it, so one post can answer several reports.
| Table | Role in the system |
|---|---|
| users | User data and permissions, optionally linked to a governorate |
| governorates | Reference list of governorates |
| regions | Regions belonging to each governorate, with details such as coordinates |
| posts | Official posts and their type (true, fake, under verification), with a self-reference linking a fake item to its correction, and an optional link to a region |
| post_images / post_videos | Images and videos attached to posts |
| claims | User reports about external content, their review status, and the post that resolved them |
| claim_images | Images attached to reports as visual evidence |
| favorites | Junction table for the many-to-many relationship between users and saved posts |
| About | Static site content such as contact information and introductory text |
The project documents the final interfaces with screenshots covering all roles:
| Interface | Function |
|---|---|
| Home page | Displays official news to visitors and users |
| Claim comparison | Shows the false claim alongside the official correction |
| News archive | Browse and search previous posts |
| Admin dashboard | Manage users, governorates and regions, and site information |
| Editor dashboard | Manage posts and review reports |
| Regular user dashboard | Follow reports and favorites |
Non-functional requirements set by the project include hashing passwords with an algorithm such as bcrypt, securing dashboards with a role-and-permission system, optimized queries for responsiveness, and full Arabic and RTL support.
The project concludes that it achieved its main goal by building an official channel for publishing news that lets users take part in verification, with a Laravel back end and a relational database managing the relationships between users, posts, reports, and media, plus Arabic-supporting interfaces and dashboards. The abstract and conclusion describe the output as a web platform and a mobile app, while the implementation chapter documents the interfaces and dashboards through screenshots without a separate technical description of the mobile app.
The reported results are functional: the project includes no quantitative measurements such as response time, load testing, or a trial with real users. The figures cited in the literature review (such as 92% accuracy for a CNN model or 80% for crowdsourced assessment) are results of other studies and do not belong to this platform.
According to the outlook in the project, the platform could be extended through:
These items remain future developments, not features of the current version.
If you are working on a web platform for managing and analyzing content and need technical help developing the idea or building a prototype, you can contact the Techno Enjaz office to discuss your project's requirements and the appropriate scope of support.
It is an academic web platform built by a team of students with technical assistance from Techno Enjaz, intended as an official reference where competent authorities publish verified news and correct misleading claims in post-liberation Syria. Users can report suspicious external content, and editors verify it and publish the official response.
A registered user submits a report with a title, the source link, and the claim text, optionally with supporting images, and it appears in the editor's pending reports list. The editor sets the item's status (true, fake, or under verification) and publishes an official post that the report is linked to; when a claim is debunked, the fake item is linked to the correction in a comparison view.
No. Verification in the implemented version relies on human review by editors. Machine learning models that analyze linguistic patterns or link propagation networks and prioritize reports by suspicion level are proposed as future work, and the accuracy figures cited from prior studies do not belong to this platform.
The platform uses the Laravel framework with the MVC pattern and PHP, a MySQL database implemented through Laravel Migrations, and an XAMPP development environment with the Apache server. HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, and JavaScript were used for the interfaces with Arabic and RTL support, and the database includes tables for users, governorates, regions, posts and their media, reports and their images, and favorites.
The platform has four tiered roles: guest, registered user, editor, and system administrator, who manages users, governorates, regions, and site information. Current limits include fully manual verification, search by keyword and governorate only, no instant notifications or analytics dashboard, and no documented performance measurements or trial with real users.
Reach out to Techno Enjaz engineering team to discuss technical feasibility, prototype hardware, and development scope.
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