Faced with increasing demands from users, tech companies like Facebook and Google are trying to take a stand and do their part in the ‘battle’ against fake news. Among several courses of action, they are backing up fact-checking projects and start-ups.
Factmata, developed by University College of London and University of Sheffield, is one of them, as it received funding by Google starting from January 2017.
Factmata's aim is to tackle the issue of fake news via AI, artificial intelligence, in order to make the process automated. We spoke to its founder, Dhruv Ghulati.
Do you think that fact-checking is indeed the best tool there is to debunk fake news at the moment?
The most important thing to solve this problem is to get normal readers and users to double-check their own content, rather than relying on someone else. The difficult thing today is that it is increasingly hard to do this - there is information overload, and people lack time.
My goal is to give them the best tools possible to do so, and sometimes even nudge them into double-checking articles so people learn the art of fact checking themselves.
Why have you chosen automatization?
At the moment, the start of the process is almost entirely manual. However, what an AI can do well is filter what is "fact-checkable", and then hopefully guide the user to the right process or sources to fact check something. Over time, we can automate more and more as research in this field finds new and new insights into the fact-checking process.
What kind of results do you expect?
Being a closed and private beta and not a full release, we are keen on understanding what types of people like to fact check, what we can change in our tool to make things better for our users, but most importantly what claims people find interesting and want to checkacross the web, and around the domain of politics. For now we are only focusing on allowing people to check things about national government statistics, because we wanted to start small to begin with.
In your opinion, what has caused this fake news conundrum and has brought verification to the forefront?
Obviously the elections and politics, but I've been talking about the difficulty and the importance of factual debates for a while. It's just one of those subtle things that affect us all the time in our lives, we just don't see it.
Every time you are having an argument with your friends, you have to trust what they are saying is correct and you don't have time to verify what they are saying is true if you don't have that information at the tips of your fingertips. I am obsessed about the importance of having debates in our communities and empowering people to have those facts in real time.
Fact checking should affect all of our lives, not just the fact-checking of politicians, especially in a world where information is so easy to distribute and so quickly.
