The Ideogram®

The Ideogram® is a social fact-checking platform that aims to combat the spread of misinformation and disinformation by providing a space for users to report and debunk content.

The spread of misinformation is a growing problem on digital platforms today, with potentially severe consequences for public health, politics, and society. It can cause harm to individuals and groups, spread fear and confusion, and undermine trust in institutions and the media.

While there are some existing fact-checking efforts online, they need to be more cohesive and easier to access for an average user.

Moreover, it is often difficult to counter misinformation once it is shared widely. For instance, the "echo chamber" effect of social media means that people are often more likely to encounter and believe information that confirms their preexisting beliefs, even if it is invalid.

Research has found that misinformation on social media can spread rapidly, with false stories often spreading further and faster than true ones. In a study of 126,000 Twitter posts, three MIT scholars found that false news was 70% more likely to be retweeted than trustworthy news.

Further, monitoring and selecting content to fact-check can be overwhelming due to the large volume of information shared online. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, an estimated 1.5 million new articles are published online each day. Hence, fact-checkers find it difficult to keep up.

It can take them hours or even days to conduct fact checks, which means some misleading content can continue to leak and spread unabated. It can even lead to the persistence of false information, even after its debunked.

The Ideogram® is well-positioned to make a significant impact in the fight against misinformation online. By providing a central platform for reporting and debunking misleading content, we will empower users to make informed decisions and protect themselves from the negative effects of misinformation.

Reports will be reviewed by a team of fact-checkers, who will verify the accuracy of the information and provide a verdict on its reliability. In addition, users will be able to submit their own research and arguments to support or debunk the reported content.

The platform will also feature a news feed of fact-checked content, allowing users to easily stay informed about current events and issues. To further promote engagement and a sense of community, we will also offer user profiles, discussion forums, and the ability to follow and interact with other users.

The Ideogram® is for journalists, researchers, individuals, and organizations in Africa who rely on the internet as a source of information. The platform will provide them with a tool to swiftly and efficiently verify the accuracy of the information they come across on digital media, which could help them produce more accurate and reliable content. 

The Ideogram® will enable users to identify and avoid spreading misinformation, which could protect their reputation and prevent them from inadvertently contributing to spreading false information and propaganda.

Moreover, it will facilitate a space for journalists, content creators, and organizations to build credibility with their audiences by demonstrating their commitment to accuracy and fact-checking. In addition, users save time and resources rather than having to do manual searches.

The Ideogram® is developed by a team of two with strong backgrounds in computer science & software development. We have participated in different internship programs at well-established IT companies in Kenya.

We are still undertaking computer science studies and private studies in augmented intelligence. As IT students and practitioners, we often interact with online digital platforms to get access to information as needed to do academic and industry research. Online sources have an abundance of data and can be easily accessed.

We shared concerns about the accuracy and relevance of the information we retrieve from the world wide web, which made us question the credibility of journalistic work. The spread of harmful and misleading information is an issue that is affecting many of our peers.

It creates an environment of distrust and fear, where data is manipulated to benefit specific individuals, groups, or organizations for monetary or political gain. We decided to do something about it by starting a technology company that seeks to address the limitations of digital platforms to counter the spread of misinformation.

We believe that by applying the augmented intelligence approach in the development of fact-checking tools, we could reduce the occurrence of bias in automated tools and speed up the response time to debunk harmful or misleading content.

First, we had to gain insights into the unique challenges and information gaps of the African population by speaking with some individuals, local researchers, and journalists.

Secondly, we had to evaluate the performance and impact of existing fact-checking initiatives to determine the loopholes in existing methodologies. 

We learned that fact-checkers find it challenging to debunk content once it has been shared widely, and choosing which content to check can be overwhelming due to the volume of information. Hence misinformation continues to spread unabated.

Moreover, we had to assess the demand and potential of fact-checking services, where we found out that the industry is relatively new, with few players still in the early stages of development. 

However, there is a high demand from businesses looking to maintain the trust of their customers and stakeholders, as well as government agencies and international organizations concerned with spreading misinformation and disinformation.

We concluded that the best course of action was to build a platform that considers the need for users to report, debunk and identify misleading content and the need for fact-checkers to sort content to check based on factors such as popularity, time sensitivity, and user suggestions.

The Ideogram® will comprise a web application integrated with a browser extension, allowing users to quickly check the accuracy of the information they come across while surfing the internet without navigating away from the page they are on.

The core design and functionality of The Ideogram® is based on the augmented intelligence approach which incorporates human expertise and advanced artificial intelligence techniques to improve the accuracy and efficiency fact-checking.

Our platform makes use natural language processing to automatically detect and analyze text-based information, such as news articles, computer vision to analyze images and videos, and deep learning techniques to improve the algorithms ability to identify and flag false information.

Here is how we stands out from existing fact-checking solutions:

1.  We want to cultivate brand awareness by establishing partnerships with accredited fact-checking organizations.
2. Improve our business model by focusing on transparent processes, and impartiality, which is key for establishing trust between our platform and our end users.
3. We want to increase our platform’s ability to to effectively scale the fact-checking process to handle a large volume of information in real-time. This may involve using distributed computing systems, such as clusters of servers or cloud-based services, to process and analyze the data.

The Ideogram® typically uses a combination of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques to automatically identify and assess the veracity of information shared on digital platforms. One key component of the technology is the ability to understand and extract relevant information from unstructured text, such as social media posts or news articles. This often involves techniques such as text classification, named entity recognition, and sentiment analysis.

Our platform then uses this extracted information, along with other signals such as the source of the information and the context in which it was shared, to determine the likelihood that the information is accurate or not. This assessment is often done using supervised machine learning algorithms, which have been trained on large datasets of previously fact-checked information.

The Ideogram® has a user-friendly interface that allows users to easily access and understand the fact-checking results, and also allow them to easily report misinformation or false information.

We are currently on schedule to launch our beta platform by the end of April. During the first year of our launch, we estimate to get at least 1,500 active and 3,000 registered users, and 250 verified moderators by the end of April 2024.

Even though we have a combined experience of four years in coding, we are still learning how to implement various artificial intelligence techniques hence the prototype we develop might not fulfil all intended goals. Moreover, we need more skilled expertise with backgrounds in fact checking and journalism. 

We are still working on establishing a partnership with local fact-checking organizations and media outlets interested in working with us.

The Ideogram®  platform offers a variety of services specific to different types of users, hence we have a B2C and B2B model.

For B2C, we offer a subscription-based service where individuals can pay a monthly or annual fee to access premium features such us advanced labelling with detailed analytics, customised alerts, access to a team of fact-checkers on demand, and integration with other tools and platforms for their personal use.

For B2B, we offer a similar subscription-based service for organizations, with the added benefit of additional features such as report generation and integration with third-party tools to aid in reputation management.

Additionally, The Ideogram® will also generate revenue through partnerships with media companies, brands, and governments for B2B services such as monitoring and analysis of public discourse.

The Ideogram® aims to promote accurate information and combat misinformation on social media. In order to ensure the long-term viability of our platform, we developed a comprehensive strategy for generating revenue, increasing visibility, and managing costs.

First, we identified subscriptions, advertising, and crowdfunding as the key revenue streams viable for our platform. Subscriptions will offer our users exclusive access to fact-checking reports, additional research resources, and other value-added services. Advertising will give a space for businesses and organizations that share our mission to sell their products and services. Crowdfunding will help us support community-led projects and initiatives, and where rewards are will be given to those contribute to fact-checking efforts.

Secondly, we came up with a marketing and outreach plan. This plan will help us develop a strong marketing strategy to promote our platform to attract a wide range of audiences. We will also invest in PR and media relations to increase our visibility and credibility with the public and media outlets. As well as building partnerships with other organizations in the fact-checking and media industry to leverage their networks and reach new audiences.

Furthermore, will maintain a lean organizational structure, keep our overhead costs low, and use open-source tools and technologies to reduce software and development costs.