The term 'post-truth' was voted word of the year in 2016 by the Oxford Dictionary. That year, concerns about misinformation peaked in the midst of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. Although he was only 15 years old at the time, Argentinian Diego Estévez was shocked by the problem and began to think of ways to ensure reliable news sources.
After years of work, Estévez turned this dream into TotalStories.AI, a platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools to create a trust index for news. Based on its wording and the sources used, algorithms estimate the trustworthiness of the news. This approach has made Estévez one of the winners of MIT Technology Review in Spanish's Innovators under 35 Latin America 2020.
Before coming up with a solution, Estévez analyzed the problem and found a misalignment of incentives. "On the one hand, there are incentives for tabloid news that seek clicks, do not reflect real life, and are linked to an agenda. On the other hand, there is a disconnect between the people who experience the facts and the people who publish the news," he explains.
He therefore decided to find a tool capable of "interpreting the news that people publish on social networks and providing a direct link between the people who experience the facts and the journalists." In addition to helping fight misinformation, TotalStories.AI also allows journalists to have access to leads, breaking news and sources "without relying on larger newspapers."
He adds: "The TotalStories.AI app allows you to follow what's happening in the world in real time. Having access to news that actually reflects what's happening in the real world is something that obviously benefits us all. TotalStories.AI can improve the quality of news."
In addition to offering a tangible improvement to people's lives, Estévez wants to partner with large companies capable of adapting his product to their needs so that they can also benefit from this artificial intelligence tool. "In the long term, the idea is to create an ecosystem of applications and data where citizen journalism is analyzed in order to expand its influence," explains the Argentinian innovator.
The president of the board of directors of HGBeyond Material Science (Spain) and member of the Innovators under 35 Latin America 2020 jury, Paloma Cabello, thinks that "Estévez is solving the problem of fake news at a significant level, combining several different AI-related tools and techniques in order to provide a reliable automated system to detect biases in published content on a global scale."
