Taming fake news with logic and AI

The recentlyconcluded Lok Sabha elections turned out to be a tough task for Logically a UKbased machinelearning platform that works on busting fake news During the polls a team of 25 in Bangalore combed through over 33000 pieces of disinformation to put out analysed and credible news to usersThe platform was founded in 2017 by Lyric Jain 23 a Cambridge and MIT student of artificial intelligence AI and is designed for gathering the biggest news stories from about 90000 domains for determining the credibility of the claims in each article Logically worked on the Swedish elections last yearMassive flow of infoHowever for the Indianorigin techie working on the Indian elections was an entirely new challenge Our platform can find and factcheck fake information in real time and yet we needed such a large team You can imagine the massive flow of information in India said Jain in a chat with midday on WednesdayJain said a majority of Indian social media users who have been recently introduced to the Internet tend to be naiumlve while consuming and sharing fake information The largest circulated piece of fake information during the polls was about Congress president Rahul Gandhi being a foreign citizen One more piece that became viral was about an actors foreign citizenship he saidSpeaking about how Logically was born Jain said when he was in university the Brexit debate had taken every news platform by storm People in messaging groups had extreme views Information coming in from both sides mdash pro and antiBrexit mdash was totally inaccurate misleading and threatened the personal relationships From this point I started working on Logically to help reduce the amount of misinformation and hyperpartisan information people were exposed to We are now a fullycommercial platform offering free and customised servicesNo political party hereIn India Logically has started working with various clients on a longterm basis and in the past two months worked with some on a casetocase basis The team includes data scientists journalists and AI experts who have built tools for offering a new level of insight into important news storiesHas Jain worked with political parties Why would political parties hire us In fact a significant portion of fake stuff comes from them We arent a platform that tweaks algorithms to spread fake information Our job is to filter fake information fact check it and circulate its correct formThe WhatsApp problemFor the team filtering information on WhatsApp is a huge challenge With 300 million users in India the messaging app had become a campaigning tool It happens only in India In countries like UK people still use Facebook messenger and SMS In India we have other apps like Telegram as well Since WhatsApp messaging is encrypted endtoend even the service provider cannot see the texts This is the biggest challenge for fact checkers he said Jain wondered why WhatsApp hadnt thought of setting up its office in India till 2018 Their campaign for preventing fake news is limited to stop sharing rumoursBusting fake infoBut Jain said his experiment for checking WhatsApp rumourmongering should help a great deal We have been able to create a reverse chain of messaging that offers correct information to the end users For example if fake information gets out from one individual to 30 others we would be able to offer verified content to one person in thatgroup which they can share with members who have read the fake content It should make the problem solvableImages shared on the platform remain an issue According to Jain text verification is comparatively easier but images can be verified only through tools not all users may have access to Memes get shared more than most popular news articles he said To show how disinformation is spread through photos Jain took out his phone and showed a scan of a union ministers resignation letter which had a forged government logoFor now Logically is filtering memes in two languages We are focusing on Hindi and English verifying the content and passing it on to regional feeders who in turn reach out to regional media said JainWhen it comes to reporting and commentary Jain said news television in India has more commentary whereas the print media sticks to facts He sees the print media as factually correct when compared to other formats but added the major players had extreme biasesNeed correct infoAs for tools that can make the lives of factcheckers easy in India Jain said they needed easy access to correct information especially from the central and state governments In UK and USA he said all kinds of information is readily available in a machinereadable format But in India reams of PDFs are uploaded on the websites If I were to ask about expenditure on a particular scheme in a particular district I wont get the answer in real time I will have to download pages find relevant columns and do calculations on paper Jain said this online information mess was a blot on the expertise of 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