Misinformation is undoubtedly one of the scourges of our time, diluting our faith in everything from climate change to politics. Government departments in Britain and the United States joined together to form ‘The Tech Challenge’ and offer startups $250,000 to try and produce a solution.
The finalists consisted of seven companies from around the world, with the victor proving to be Czech startup Semantic Visions, that provides real-time analysis of some 90% of the world’s online news contant. It then uses data analytics and risk assessment to spot unknown events, identify trends and provide context to their analysis to enable actionable intelligence.
“Having worked on creating ways to counter disinformation since 2016, this is the first major recognition we have received on our work. It is an honour and a pleasure to receive this grant. We look forward to working with the UK and U.S government on helping to protect democracy,” Semantic Visions say.
The competition attracted entries from around the world, with the 7 finalists emanating from the UK, US, Bulgaria, Italy, Ukraine and Czech Republic. The other finalists were:
- DeepSeer – a UK company that provides a new and unique online platform that tracks and maps online influencers. DeepSeer looks at what people see, as well as what people say, to help build a view of influence at both an individual and network level. This platform can be used to help better identify how disinformation is spread online.
- Changing Character of War Centre is a partnership between the University of Oxford and Artis Looking Glass, which seeks to marry up social science with machine learning and artificial intelligence, to provide more robust defensive measures against online hostile state disinformation campaigns.
- Observatory on Social Media is a program from the Indiana University Network Science Institute that provides a suite of free online tools for journalists, NGOs and citizens to help identify BOTs and disinformation, including Hoaxy- a visualisation tool for misinformation diffusion networks and Botometer- a tool to help spot twitter bots.
- Sensika Technologies is a Bulgarian based company that works with NGOs and Universities to build and provide digital tools and global media monitoring analytics across all the social and broadcast media, and would use their tools to help better identify disinformation.
- WaterOnMars is a social media monitoring company that uses tailor made tools to provide social media intelligence, identify new trends and reputational threats; including the diffusion of disinformation through organised BOT networks.
- Information System Security Partners is a Ukrainian cyber security company that seeks to set up a non-for-profit platform for NGOs, activists and journalists to crowd source and geographically map the origin, spread and dispersion of disinformation.
