US news publisher The Washington Post has created a Chrome extension that aims to fact-check President-elect Donald Trumps tweets within Twitters own timeline.

The release of the extension follows Trumps tweets over the weekend, which were accused of attempting to deflect attention from claims of Russian interference in the US presidential election with false claims about Hillary Clinton illegally receiving questions ahead of a debate.

“We made a tool that slips a bit more context into Trumps tweets,” wrote Philip Bump, a reporter for The Washington Post in a story announcing the extension. “Its still in the early stages, but our goal is to provide additional context where needed for Trumps tweets moving forward (and a few golden oldies).

“Sometimes, we just add more context, like when Trump announced his pick of Rex Tillerson to serve as Secretary of State. Curious for more info? Its right there in the tweet now.”

While the tool will help provide context for some Twitter users, it will only work within Chrome browsers. This means anyone accessing Twitter via an app (either an official one or one of many third-party Twitter apps) or using an alternative browser will not be able to use the tool. In addition, some extensions suffer problems when used in the mobile version of Chrome or on particular smartphone models, so with 80 per cent of Twitter users accessing the service via mobile, the impact of the extension may be quite limited.

Trumps bombastic presence on Twitter provided him with millions in free media coverage during the Presidential campaign, but he has also drawn criticism for his behaviour on the social network, especially since becoming President-elect. His criticism of Chuck Jones, the president of a local steelworkers union, was seen by many as an unfair attack on a private citizen, and his complaints about Boeing, who are contracted to build a new Air Force One jet, resulted in the companys stock taking a tumble.

Trump met with several notable tech leaders at his transition headquarters in New York last week, but Twitter was notably excluded from the meeting, reportedly because CEO Jack Dorsey rejected an attempt by Trumps campaign to attach a custom emoji to the #CrookedHillary hashtag during one of the Presidential debates.