(This is a repost from an idea originally posted on June 21, 2020. You can read more of our original ideas in our archive.)
Problem: People have lost their trust in traditional news media for a number of reasons, including polarization, bias, and the abundance of clickbait/misinformation given the ease of content creation.
Solution: A business that uses artificial intelligence to revolutionize the way that “credible information” is found. The Factual has set out to accomplish this. I reached out to their team to learn a bit more about what they do and about why they think their solution is a billion-dollar startup.
The Factual utilizes AI and machine learning to find credible information. We employ an algorithm that evaluates articles and grades them on four criteria out of 100%:
neutrality of tone, determined by a data set of emotive terms and phrases,
diversity of sources, which is the extent and quality of unique links and quotes per article,
author expertise, which is calculated based on that author’s previous scores on that topic, and
site authority, which is the historical average of all articles published from that site.
To minimize programming our biases into the AI, we did not train the model with lists of sites or articles we thought were credible. That would simply encode our preferences. The above four criteria can be objectively measured so that the assessment remains as neutral as possible. For example, if an article has extensive sources, is written in a neutral tone, and written by a reporter with a history of reporting on that issue, the article is likely to score well, particularly if other reporters on that site have a similar focus and depth.
In the era of media literacy (and what I like to call “news reconstruction” after the renewed interest in “fake news”), The Factual is one of many news startups in the smart news space hoping to eliminate echo chambers and bias. If you’re interested in learning more about them, I recommend that you subscribe to their daily newsletter, read their blog, or download their free Chrome extension,
Monetization: Subscription model, paywall, and community events.
Contributed by: Kathryn Kelly, Arjun Moorthy, and Nicole Li (thefactual.com)