Full Fact: Impartial and effective
Full Fact is a charity that provides free tools, information and advice so that anyone can check the claims of politicians and the media.
As highlighted in last year’s report, funding received from the Digital News Innovation Fund in 2016 played a major role in establishing Factmata as one of the leading players in the fact-checking arena. Today, Factmata has grown from a one-man band into a business with fourteen full-time members of staff, and venture capital funding of $1 million.
“The DNI Fund allowed us to work on this opportunity full time,” says Dhruv Ghulati, CEO and Research Scientist at Factmata. “It raised our profile and gave us credibility. That enabled us to encourage engineers, developers and designers to work on the project and helped us to build momentum – which is really important in start-ups.”
The DNI Fund allowed us to work on this opportunity full time.
Currently, Factmata’s main focus is on using AI to analyse millions of URLs every day, assessing content on a sentence-by-sentence level to assess the risk to advertisers of appearing alongside what could be inappropriate content. For 2018, the company is launching Briefr, a news-sharing platform for collaborative discussion that’s focused on quality and credibility instead of likes and popularity. Factmata is also in the process of launching an open research initiative that will make its data available to other parties.
Over the last two years, Dhruv and his team have gathered an impressive portfolio of media coverage and an even more impressive list of backers, including Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, as well as the founders of organisations such as Broadcast.com, Craigslist, Zynga, Mulesoft, Brightmail and Flycast Communications.
Battling misinformation
VIS Media: In silicon there is truth
VIS is a fact-checking solution using machine learning to help journalists verify news sources.
TrustServista: A question of trust
TrustServista uses advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to determine the trustworthiness of news stories.
DNI Fund Report 2018
Explore this year's report to find out about projects that have been supported by the DNI Fund and the impact they’re having in newsrooms across Europe.