Indian-origin entrepreneur's UK start-up to launch AI technology to curb fake news
Lyric Jain
Lyric Jain, an alumnus from Cambridge University who is originally from Mysore, created Logically in 2017 has since built the company into a machine-learning platform to filter real from fiction.
An Indian-origin entrepreneur's UK-based startup is using artificial intelligence to tackle the ongoing crisis of fake news. The 21-year-old entrepreneur's start-up uses a machine-learning algorithm to sift fact from fiction and is set to combat fake news around the world, including plans for a project specifically targeted at India.
Lyric Jain, an alumnus from Cambridge University who is originally from Mysore, created Logically in 2017 and has since built the company into a machine-learning platform to filter real from fiction.
Over 20 people have been killed in mostly rural areas across India in lynchings instigated by false information in a span of few months.
The technology is currently going through multiple trials with its partners and advisors and will be launched on September for the UK and the US, and hit India by October.
"The Logically platform gathers the biggest news stories from over 70,000 domains and determines the credibility of the claims across each article. It does this by using a machine learning algorithm that is designed to detect logical fallacy, political bias, and incorrect statistics," the 21-year-old techie said, as quoted by PTI.
"By illuminating the quality of information across these articles, Logically provides users with a transparent and insightful view that allows them to determine how trustworthy the news they read really is," he added.
On WhatsApp, with 1.5 billion users, information can go viral in minutes as individuals forward messages along to their friends or groups, without any way to determine its origin. Messaging platforms have hosted disinformation campaigns in at least 10 countries this year, according to a report by the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University.
India has over 200 million WhatsApp users and with the system being encrypted, it becomes extremely difficult for law enforcement to intervene and stop fake stories from spreading.
"Because of the highly emotive nature of these stories, people are quick to react. This means the time it takes to disprove compelling fake news stories is often too long to prevent action being taken," Jain said.
"We are still exploring options such as an instant verification chatbot on WhatsApp and will announce our plans by the end of the year," he said.
Now WhatsApp, under pressure from political leaders and spurred by new leadership, is taking steps to root out misinformation. Executives held urgent meetings with political leaders in India last week, and the service is building new technology to promote news literacy.
On Thursday, the company announced a major change, limiting the ability to forward messages - a feature that has been blamed for enabling disinformation to go viral.
WhatsApp said it will also test a lower limit of five chats - individual or group chats - at a time and remove the quick forward button next to media messages.