India Startup MetaFact Is Fighting Fake News Using AI

There's a reason why Jack Dorsey would prefer to have Twitter moved to a blockchain platform. The decentralized solution, according to the social media company's CEO, will be a better way of distributing and managing content, but that could be Dorsey's fondness for blockchain and crypto that's talking. Still, there's no denying the spread of content that sparks fear, uncertainty, doubt, outrage, and controversy online.

In India, social media platforms are pestered with misinformation. The Economic Times of India even labeled 2019 as the year of "fake news" as counts of false stories were at its record high this year for the country. But for this one local startup, the fight against misinformation comes with the aid of artificial intelligence.

MetaFact is a company born out of the marriage between AI and journalism. What it does is it uses natural language processing (a subfield of AI that deals with the interaction between human and computer language) or NLP to learn and detect what content constitutes as misinformation -- it's a fact-checking tool that combines linguistics and computer science.

The startup's founding CEO, Sagar Kaul, described to Undrark via email how their tool can permeate newsrooms, saying, "The power to detect and monitor fake news in real time, sifting through all the data cacophony that is generated online."

The process works with the fact-checking tool doing the preliminary analyses for the various content published online, including blogs, social media posts, and news stories. MetaFact analyzes the wordings or sentences that, from the data and other written work fed for the AI to learn, may exemplify a fabricated tale.

Then, the tool filters this out and advances to the human phase of the content audit. The company's staff with a background in journalism will take over and ultimately make the determination. Kaul said that their main focus is to train the tool to not flag a sentence because of the wording. What they want MetaFact to do is enable it to understand the context of what is being said in the sentence.

MetaFact is not alone in the search for online truth. Another company based in Sydney that goes by the same name also offers the same fact-checking tool minus the AI. This Aussie version of MetaFact is similar to Quora, where users can ask questions, but only the answers of verified experts would get published.

If a social media company like Twitter does move to a blockchain platform, what's important to understand is that it's everyone's fight for an online space free of misinformation and disinformation. And tools like both versions of MetaFact indicate that this ongoing battle against those who propagate falsehood continues.