In a world where deadlines rule, media professionals often struggle to find the time or resources to distinguish the fake from the real. And that means they can inadvertently distribute content that misleads readers and jeopardises the hard-won reputation of their organisation.

In Romania, a fact-checking project supported by the DNI Fund is currently fact checking around 60,000 articles per day – and is scaling up to more than treble that number.

TrustServista uses advanced artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to determine the trustworthiness of news stories. Customers submit a URL or raw text and the algorithms analyse the article, identifying semantic similarities, links and references between it and other content on the web before generating a set of trustworthiness metrics. These include a TrustLevel score – which indicates the content’s degree of trustworthiness – and Patient Zero, which identifies the original source of the article. This could be anything from social media or blog posts to website pages or news outlets.

Because TrustServista is delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS), it’s easy to adopt and use. It can also be integrated into third-party software systems, such as newsroom technologies, social media platforms or customer-centric widgets and web browser add-ons.

“Although TrustServista has only been in operation since the end of 2017, we’ve already achieved some significant results,” says George Bara, Chief Strategy Officer. “For example, when news outlets reported a crash involving an airplane and a helicopter just above the Rothschild’s family home in the UK, a couple of conspiracy websites were quick to announce the news of Jacob Rothschild’s death. These reports rapidly gathered over 27,000 Facebook engagements. We correctly identified the information source (with Patient Zero) and automatically scored these articles as having a low-to-medium content quality.”

“We believe we’re making a real difference by helping news organisations and other media professionals provide a better, more accurate and verified news service to their readers. This simply wouldn’t have been possible without the Digital News Innovation Fund. Our parent company, Zetta Cloud, would never have been able to spend €50,000 on developing a prototype that may not have worked. But it did work – and thanks to the DNI Fund, Zetta Cloud had the confidence to invest a further €150,000. We now employ three full-time members of staff and are moving towards being a financially sustainable business, which we expect to happen in the next 18 months to two years.”