Social media play a huge part in the circulation of the latest news and information. On the flip side, the platforms are grappling with issues such as misinformation, fake news and controversies. Popular social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have mechanisms to curb the spread of fake news. However, the checks and balances have proved inadequate in containing the superspreaders. A Twitter survey confirmed Winston Churchill’s theory: A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. Right on cue, we see a proliferation of fact-checking startups, and rightly so.
Here are five Indian startups combating the scourge of fake news.
(The list is in alphabetical order)
1| Check4Spam
Founding year: 2015
Headquarters: Bangalore
About: Founded by a group of IT professionals from Bangalore, Bal Krishn Birla and Shammas Oliyath, Check4Spam provides non-commercial online service to identify fake news circulating social media platforms. Last year, Karnataka State Police collaborated with Check4Spam to counter fake news and rumours amid the Coronavirus outbreak.
Know more here.
2| Citispotter
Founding year: 2019
Headquarters: Cranfield (UK), Bedfordshire, United Kingdom
About: Founded by Pallav Sethiya and Dushyant Sethiya, Citispotter is a UK-India based startup that develops AI-driven end-to-end content solutions for businesses. The startup has created a proprietary integrated content analysis engine which helps companies optimise emotional engagement of their contents as well as decrease harmful and damaging content.
The tech uses insights from Citispotter’s algorithm that analyses over 11 artificial intelligence-based signals to suggest and prioritise the critical content quality issues.The company also helps organisations and businesses create positive societal impact and avoid the potential risks such as ad placement on harmful content, bad publicity, content penalties, etc.
Know more here.
3| Logically
Founding year: 2016
Headquarters: London
About: Founded by an Indian-origin entrepreneur, Lyric Jain, Logically is an AI-powered startup that combines insights from AI and human intelligence to determine credibility and recognise bias to set the tone for the coverage. The company uses ensemble machine learning models, and Natural Language Processing to cluster misinformation indicators to assess the content’s credibility. Last year, the startup won the Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge in the news category.
Know more here.
4| MetaFact
Team MetaFact: (From left) Prateek Singh, Praveen Anasurya and Sagar Kaul
Founding year: 2017
Headquarters: Delhi
About: Founded by Sagar Kaul, Minho Ryu and Praveen Anasuya, MetaFact is a Delhi-based startup that aims to counter the dissemination of fake news across the internet. The flagship product uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand the context of the news articles, blog posts, and social media posts, and performs cognitive operations ( including bucketing, indexing, and trust scoring), providing intelligent access to data. Also, to solve the problem of fake videos, MetaFact has developed a tool called Deepfakes.
Know more here.
5| Trylika Technologies
Founding year: 2019
Headquarters: Dhanbad, Jharkhand
About: Founded in 2019 by Sagar Mishra and his team, Trylika Technologies Pvt Ltd introduced 13TABS, a web search engine that does not track and store personal information of its users. It also helps to stop the spread of fake news and misinformation. 13TABS has a fact-checking tool integrated with its result page. It also offers Quick Search and Scattering to search the web. Quick Search displays the results like a conventional search engine while Scattering allows users to categorise the results.
Know more here.
