These Ex-Journalists Are Using AI to Catch Online Defamation

Like many stories about people trying to help fix the internet, this one begins in the aftermath of 2016. From his home in Ireland, Conor Brady had watched the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump with disbelief. In his view, the prominence of false stories during each election--whether about Muslim immigrants or Hillary Clinton's health--was the direct consequence of a hollowed-out news industry without the resources to check the spread of disinformation. At the time, Conor's son, Neil--also a former journalist--was working as a digital policy analyst at the Institute of International and European Affairs, researching neural networks and machine learning. The two got to thinking.