When you spend time on the internet, invariably most of your time is spent consuming lies and half-truths. Even if you can filter these things out, odds are other people in your circle won’t.
As we well know, misinformation has consequences. Hard-earned money evaporates into get-rich-quick scams. Patients are turning away from proven treatments in favor of bogus drugs.
And the target of false defamation suffers from long-term defamation.
So what should we do? As with most social issues where technology plays a role in proliferation, innovators believe that technology will play a role in containing proliferation.
Entrepreneurs are also on board. Crunchbase data analysis shows that over the past few years, investors have invested more than $300 million in a variety of startups researching methods to combat disinformation and misinformation.
Disinformation is a growing market:
In general, a surge in venture capital on a particular topic is due to at least one of two factors. First, the problems the founders were solving got worse. Second, the techniques creators use to address these issues have improved.
Misinformation can point to both worsening problems and technological advances. There is also a sense of urgency as the target of the attack realizes how difficult post-mortem recovery can be.
“The markets changed, the world changed, and now a lot more potential clients understand the situation,” said Gideon Blocq, CEO and co-founder of VineSight, an Israeli software-as-a-service startup that secured a $4 million seed round in September.
The company uses AI to identify suspicious patterns of digital content sharing, with a focus on spotting damaging narratives before they spread too far.
VineSight is one of several funded startups that pitches its offering to brands to help manage their online reputations.
Nonprofits, celebrities and their affiliates, digital content platforms, and governments are also target markets for developers of tools aimed at ferreting out misinformation.
It’s a growing problem:
Political misinformation is up 150% this past year, observed Noam Schwartz, CEO and co-founder of ActiveFence, a developer of technology to detect malicious content online.
He points to Russian disinformation around the invasion of Ukraine, along with rising disinfo around elections and health care.
“Most disturbing is how we’ve seen online hate speech and extremism spilling from the digital world into the physical one, as we saw in the attack on the Brazilian capital on Jan. 8 this year,” he noted.
In addition to the increase in misinformation across political, health and other segments, new laws and regulations are also spurring interest in tools to combat the surge, Schwartz said.
The Digital Services Act in the EU should have a particularly strong impact, as it carries fines of up to 6% of a company’s annual global revenue for noncompliance, he added.
Largest funding recipients:
Judging by sums put to work, venture investors see this as a lucrative addressable audience.
One of the largest funding recipients, New York- and Tel Aviv-based ActiveFence, has raised $100 million in known funding to date. The company sells its offering to social media, streaming and gaming platforms, with an eye to fostering safer environments to while away our online hours.
Another venture capitalist favorite, San Francisco-based Primer, has raised $168 million to date for natural language processing technology designed to pull insights from vast amounts of data, with applications including detecting disinformation. Among the company’s customers are defense and intelligence agencies and consumer brands.
In addition to disinformation campaigns, developers like Primer and VineSight are looking for new narratives that can damage an organization’s reputation.
For example, Primer points out situations where it has uncovered harmful information about harmful packaging chemicals threatening a fast-food chain’s reputation. In this case, just discovering the meme wasn’t enough. The company was also quick to announce a policy change to address the issue.
Is this the right technology for the job?
Not everyone is convinced that today’s technology is up to the task of weeding out the vast amount of false and misleading information available on the Internet.
“Detecting disinformation with technology is a really complex problem on many levels,” said Ethan Zuckerman, professor of public policy, communications and information at the University of Massachusetts.
“First you have to accept false information. Sometimes it’s easy. This is often difficult and subjective. And even if you can do it for big conspiracy theories, it’s hard to do misinfo debunking for local stories all over the world.”
Another problem Zuckerman points out is much of what we might consider misinformation is more propagandistic than explicitly false. One can, for instance, weave a narrative that isn’t exactly a lie but does leave out key facts or dissenting viewpoints.
For Blocq and VineSight, the solution lies in focusing on the source of information, rather than fact-checking the content itself. Just as we might expect a $10 luxury designer bag for sale on a street corner to be a fake, even without close examination, we should be wary of content that can be traced to known suspect sources.
Block is optimistic that startups can do a lot to stem the flow of disinformation. But like many who study the universe, he also worries that more realistic deepfakes, ingenious AI writing tools, and other new technologies are making it easier for bad actors to spread lies faster and more efficiently.
Originally published at https://businessdor.com on February 14, 2023.
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