Look Ahead: Factmata is on a Mission Against Disinformation

Weeding through the thicket of news online can take a while. Deciding what’s real and what’s fake can take even longer. One company is working to speed up the process with the help of artificial intelligence and some big name investors: Factmata, a news platform assisted by AI that verifies statements made online in articles and social media.

“Our aim is to be able to provide a real time quality and credibility score to any piece of content on the web, and help advertisers get clarity on the potential hate speech, extreme politicized and fake content they may be putting their ads onto,” said Dhruv Ghulati, Factmata CEO and research scientist.

Ghulati, who started the company out of his bedroom, said the free platform works like a “social media” community and “developed from a desire to drive change and be part of the solution for fake news.”

During its beta testing phase, the platform was open to journalists, researchers and fact checkers with an alpha phase launch set for sometime this spring. He hopes the platform can aid in the newsgathering process as well as serve news enthusiasts.

“For news organizations and publishers, our user cases include helping with better quality newsgathering (not picking up poor quality hoaxes to report on), helping sanity and fact check articles for facts and bias, helping clean out article comments, help analyze bias in inventory, and more,” Ghulati said.

To help in his crusade against disinformation, Ghulati has attracted investments from the likes of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, and Craigslist founder Craig Newark. (Stone and Newark most recently invested.)

“This new funding allows us to expand the Factmata team and bring together leading thinkers from machine learning, online community building and journalism,” Ghulati said. “It also enables us to focus on bringing our product to market in time to solve some major upcoming problems on the internet—reducing online misinformation, screening questionable content and providing more context on what is already out there.”

Factmata arrives at a time where the pressure for news organizations to be factually accurate is at its breaking point, and where online campaigns of disinformation run rampant and the spread of fake news has been given an ever-increasing reach. For Ghulati, helping out society with this problem is why he created Factmata in the first place.

“Most of all we want to make the internet a better place for people to learn and grow from,” he said.

For more information, visit factmata.com.