The founder of Court TV is launching a startup that will help internet platforms sift through news stories and weed out fake news.
According to Axios, Steve Brill has raised nearly $6 million to fund News Guard. He plans to hire several dozen journalists, who will be tasked with reading news stories and rating them so that search engines and social media networks can display legitimate news.
A Yale graduate, Brill founded the law magazine American Lawyer, Court TV, media watchdog Brill's Content, and the Yale Journalism Initiative. He has brought in former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, who now works as a columnist for the paper, as his CEO.
The pair, according to Axios, will hire 40-60 journalists for the project.
News Guard will charge search engines, social media networks, and news aggregators a fee for its product of verified news. Brill expects to launch the project by sometime in the middle of 2018.
The U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russia tried to influence the U.S. presidential election last year through computer hacks and the distribution of fake news on websites and social media networks. Experts such as Apple CEO have said fake news is a big problem that needs to be addressed.
Algorithms used by Facebook and other platforms have fallen short of keeping false news items out of news feeds and search results. News Guard will use humans to rate stories rather than computer programs.
Facebook also found itself in hot water after it was reported that some of its editors blacklisted conservative news websites.
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