We make truth transparent.
News Detective enables community moderation to reduce misinformation and spread media literacy at scale
Incubating at MIT Sandbox and MIT DesignX
Honorable Mention for MIT DesignX awards
can't keep up
Social media companies hire professional factcheckers to check articles one-by-one. There are only a handful of factcheckers, compared to the billions of social media posts. There are nowhere near enough factcheckers to check all of it.
Artificial intelligence won't solve this either. AI is just an extension of humans. Fake news is made to trick humans. If fake news can trick humans, it can easily trick AI.
Plus, neither professional factcheckers in the shadows nor algorithms actually let users see why something is misinformation, or let them debate and learn media literacy organically.
Crowdsourcing, letting regular users rate articles, can handle the volume and make the process transparent. But crowds aren't always that wise. Some people are biased. Some people are inexperienced. Some people are bots.
the answer: news detective
News Detective is a platform that uses moderated crowdsourcing, professional factcheckers, and AI.
crowds
Social media users rate articles for truthfulness and provide evidence on website
professionals
Professional factcheckers and more experienced users rate other users
ai
AI sorts claims to prevent redundancy, giving factcheckers the power to do more.
Ratings/explanations of highly-rated users appear on social media, both educating new users and bringing them into the News Detective universe.
growing a culture
More experienced users rate new users.
Only when a user has a high enough rating do their fact checks count
As new user ratings increase, they get more power to moderate newer users
Builds up a culture of people who know what they are doing
democratic and transparent
With news detective, it’s not social media companies deciding what’s true. It’s everyone. And it's not a mysterious process: you can see what the ratings are, who rates, and why.
Currently, misinformation starts as a few small pieces of misinformation that snowball into a big one. But with News Detective, we nip misinformation in the bud. As misinformation grows, these fact-checks follow it just as fast.
The internet is amazing. Just as we unleashed its power to produce information, we need to unleash it to figure out which information is actually true. Who knows, we could find ourselves in a world where we all know what’s going on, a world where democracy is less threatened.
Let’s get back to arguing about real things!
about us
Ilana Strauss has worked as a journalist for 15 years for The Atlantic, National Geographic, The Economist, and other publications. She was a factchecker for Facebook, TikTok, Politifact, and Readers Digest.
Sukrat Gupta is a senior data scientist and ML/NLP engineer with 8+ years of R&D experience in ML, NLP, NLU, ASR, conversational AI, information retrieval, and end-to-end ML systems
Follow us on Mastodon @newsdetective@federated.press