Technology 2 min read

Twitter Acquires Startup Fabula AI to Strengthen Fight Against Fake News

PhotoMIX-Company / Pixabay

PhotoMIX-Company / Pixabay

In an effort to stop the spread of fake news in its platform and enhance its machine learning capabilities, social networking company Twitter has acquired the London-based AI startup Fabula AI.

Fabula AI is a company founded in 2018 by Ernesto Schmitt, Damon Mannion, Michael Bronstein, and Federico Monti. Its primary goal is to develop technologies based on geometric deep learning that could help solve fake news.

Last February, the company announced its breakthrough in algorithmic fake news detection. According to an official statement released by the AI firm, its deep learning algorithm was able to identify fake news with 93 percent accuracy just hours after its dissemination.

One of the startup’s co-founders, Tel Aviv University associate professor Michael Bronstein, said:

“FABULA’s engine is already able to detect fake news with extraordinary accuracy (>93% ROC AUC), within milliseconds of processing and after only a very short spread time (2-20 hours post-publishing). By comparison, it takes a manual fact-checker on average 8 hours to clear one story. The performance of FABULA’s Geometric Deep Learning algorithm is unparalleled.”

Acquiring Fabula AI

To date, social media giants are under increasing political pressure to control online misinformation. Governments across the globe understand the power social networking sites hold when it comes to spreading information, regardless of whether it’s true or not.

Social media are so influential that people with intent to destabilize governments, disseminate manipulative messages, target specific races, and spread terror have used it to propel their objectives.

Just last month, Twitter and Facebook reportedly shut down thousands of fake Iranian accounts.

Twitter believes that acquiring Fabula AI will help it build and strengthen its internal machine learning capabilities. Fabula AI’s researchers will join Twitter’s AI research team supervised by Sandeep Pandey.

Together, they will find new ways to utilize machine learning not just to stop fake news but also to enhance Twitter’s natural language processing, recommendations system, graph deep learning, and reinforcement learning.

Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal said:

“By studying and understanding the Twitter graph, comprised of the millions of tweets, retweets, and likes shared on Twitter every day, we will be able to improve the health of the conversation, as well as products, including the timeline, recommendations, the Explore tab, and the onboarding experience.”

Read More: OpenAI’s Text Generator Could Fuel Future Fake News Fire

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Chelle Fuertes

Chelle is the Product Management Lead at INK. She's an experienced SEO professional as well as UX researcher and designer. She enjoys traveling and spending time anywhere near the sea with her family and friends.

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