Purveyors of fake news, beware. Real news has a new champion.
A Waterloo Region startup called Ground – a name derived from the term “on the ground” – has decided to tackle one of the more vexing problems of the tech revolution: the demise of journalism and the rise of made-up stories.
Ground is a news app capable of verifying stories that show up on its feed. It can tell, through a number of tools, including geo-referencing and AI, if news is real or has been manufactured by, say, a Russian bot. Moreover, the app invites users to help in the verification process, a kind of crowd-sourced reality check.
The app, which launched in iOS and Android form two weeks ago, is designed to additionally drive traffic to publishers’ news sites, helping them weather the storm generated by the migration of readers to Google, Facebook and Twitter and the like.
“Technology has done a disservice to journalism in the last 15 years,” says Sukh Singh, Ground’s CTO and co-founder. The company is based in the University of Waterloo Velocity incubator in Kitchener's Tannery complex.
“Twitter and Facebook didn’t set out to be primary news sources for anyone, but inadvertently [they] did that and somehow knocked over the entire journalism industry.
“What we want to do is not just assist journalists but elevate their role.”
The Ground app helps users distinguish accurate news and trusted outlets from those that are fraudulent or suspect. The app filters stories flagged by social media and traditional news outlets through an AI algorithm. Users in the vicinity of reported news are invited to support the veracity through pictures, video or comments. Each story is then given a credibility score. Verified stories gain a stronger push through the app; debunked stories are marked as fake.
“We didn’t want to be the second Twitter,” says Harleen Kaur, Ground’s CEO, co-founder and Singh’s sister. “But [we asked ourselves]: What is Twitter doing wrong? Why are they not getting the news piece right?
“Firstly, they never set out to be a news broadcasting operation. [Twitter is] a social media platform. It’s a great way to broadcast news, but there are no checks and balances on Facebook and Twitter.
“I can be sitting in Siberia and tweeting pictures and video from Charlottesville [Virginia, site of alt-right demonstrations last August ] or wherever, and people think because 20,000 [people] retweeted it or liked it, it must be true.
“So people are taking social validation as a signal of truth, and that has really fuelled this whole fake news problem.”
She adds: “The geo-political climate totally changed in the last year. We were thinking people were really struggling to know what’s real and what’s not.”
Kaur and Singh were real-time witnesses to what might be considered as the very moment that the geo-political climate began to shift – namely, the 2016 U.S. presidential election. At the time, both were in Atlanta, taking part in the Techstars accelerator and working with CNN and The Weather Channel.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election as U.S president, revelations about bot farms and the use of fake news to influence the election have continued in a steady stream. In the meantime, Trump himself appropriated the term “fake news” in an effort to discredit mainstream outlets like CNN and the New York Times, among others.
“We were speaking with CNN that week and we saw the organization change,” says Singh. “They went into shell-shock mode, just realizing how not just technology had impacted news outlets, but also how fake news and disinformation [were] getting weaponized, to the point where it was affecting political change, for better or worse.
That’s really where we started to converge.”
Ground grew out of an app that the siblings had partnered on previously called uCIC (you see, I see). uCIC allowed users to “see” anywhere in the world in real time via photos and videos sent by other users.
“We grew UCIC to half a million people in 180 countries,” says Kaur, “which was great.
“But UCIC was a very social experiment. What Sukh and I began thinking was [that] news was the most powerful use-case of uCIC.”
Fast-forward to Ground.
The company has five full-time employees working out of the Tannery: three engineers, plus Singh and Kaur. Singh is a software engineer who studied at the University of Waterloo. Kaur is a former NASA engineer and a former vice-president at Rolls-Royce – the first female VP at that company.
Ground additionally has a staffer based in Turkey, another in the Philippines, and recently hired Atlanta-based journalist Melissa Long, formerly of NBC affiliate 11Alive, to beef up the company’s journalism expertise. Long’s hiring generated some news of its own.
“In this troubling era of fake news, Ground's AI-powered verification process is a welcome and critical feature,” said Long, explaining in an email what made her decide to join the company.
“When consuming news, I always search for reports from multiple news organizations. That can be a tedious process. Ground eliminates the work and presents the stories from multiple reputable sources in an easy-to-use format.”
Singh and Kaur were born in India and raised in the GTA.
They considered setting up their company in Atlanta or Berlin (where Kaur once worked) but elected instead for Waterloo due to proximity to University of Waterloo and, said Kaur, because “Canada is home. Canadian values totally resonate with us.”
In that vein, it’s worth noting that “fake news” will be a topic at Communitech’s True North conference taking place May 29-31. The conference, which has a “tech for good” theme, will feature Buzzfeed journalist Craig Silverman as a speaker; Silverman is credited with coining the term "fake news" and spoke recently to Communitech News.
