Happy International Fact-Checking Day

Mark Zuckerberg recently said that fact-checking has led to "too much censorship" and "that ending third-party fact-checking was part of Meta’s strategy to return to its roots in freedom of expression". As the founder of Facticity.AI, I beg to differ. Easy access to quality fact-checking is more important than ever to combat misinformation and build a better and more informed society, especially in the age of the attention economy and media fragmentation where people no longer consume the same information even on the same platforms.

However, I also understand the challenges as someone who has worked in various writing and research roles, as fact-checking is a time-consuming task. As Prospect Magazine: https://lnkd.in/gWhPbwsJ has put it, "If you want a sense of why, print out an article, highlight every verifiable or contestable statement—every name, date, and number, every spelling, every statistic, every assertion that “this is so”, every quotation—and mark them off as you check them. It's a meticulous process." That's where Facticity.AI comes in. Our AI can transcribe, extract factual claims, and help with a first pass at verifying them from any audio or visual file, saving users including those who depend on fact-checking valuable time and resources. This is especially critical in a time where only people who have access to the walled garden of the Apple ecosystem can access the transcripts of popular podcasts, or "Echo Chamber Notes" © which are not machine Searchable, even with AI Search. Without easy access to these Echo Chamber Notes, all kinds of false, unreasonable, even libelous, and harmful claims can be made against anyone there. Unlike traditional media and writing, where "the writer must be able to make their case without relying on demonstrable falsehood", you can make wildly false claims and build nests in listeners' hair, hiding within plain earshot.

We're building tools to help fact-checkers and those who want social and mainstream media that is being produced and consumed easily accessible and fact-checkable. Regarding his book, "What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea" Fara Dabhoiwala writes that "the curious reality is that, in every sphere of life actually devoted to the collective pursuit of truth, the greatest freedom of inquiry goes hand in hand with clear rules of expression. This is true, for example of good investigative journalism, which depends on accumulating evidence, fact-checking, editorial oversight, and openness to correcting mistakes… After all, those quality-control mechanisms slow things down, add expense, and limit your freedom to just assert whatever you like. But that is precisely the cost of getting it right.” Every generalist who is content creating can in good faith try to treat themselves and their audiences to information with integrity that also wants to be free. 

I would just like to add, that while I enjoy thinking out loud as much as the next person and can make honest mistakes in conversation like anyone else. Factchecking is still a good start on a journey towards self and other discovery and a quest to move beyond ignorance, prompting critical thinking and a deeper understanding of oneself and the world, that is now easily accessible to anyone through Facticity.AI . Even if it is just "a vulgar cousin of the double-blind scientific study, the Socratic dialogue, or other forms of scholarly disputation".