We’re building a team
Back in 2011, I was localising a platform of crowdsourced journalism for Yahoo in Brazil. I wanted to ensure our audiences that there would be checks and balances over the content they interacted with. That’s how I first tried to understand why one would believe what someone else had written. But it was “my” problem only. The media still felt indestructible. If a major media company said so, then it was true for the vast majority of people.
By that time, social media was not an unstoppable opinion-making machine, but a liberating force, a deafening scream from the Millenials trying to change the world, seeing their “Arab Spring” as a repetition of the 1968 protests that sent shockwaves around the planet. “We cannot be stopped”, they thought.
At that point, none noticed how the feedback-loop mechanics were corroding the axis that holds society together. There were no alternative facts, no presidents could lie more than 20 times per day at the office, nor ruled by Twitter or engineering hazardous data traps. But slowly, enabled by new, untested technologies, bad actors got the grip of the steering wheel and unleashed hell into democracies previously seen as steel-made. The stakes of the game could not be higher. Genocides are being triggered, children are becoming blind for rubbing their eyes with methanol, people are being beaten to death thanks to false stories spreading completely unchecked.
If on one side, social media platforms are increasing their tentacular grip on reality, trying to dominate whole markets, plenty of fantastic research is being done to find a vaccine, hopefully as fast as the Covid-19 ones have been engineered. This is the part that excites us. We can see the threat, but we also eye the amazing possibilities to counter-attack.
The “vaccine” won’t come by any Pandora’s Box AI wizardry nor by a freedom of speech curb that would relish Orbans and Putin’s around the world. Information networks must be reshuffled to be resilient to fight those exploiting audiences’ vulnerabilities. And we need to empower citizens and communities to respond intelligently to misinformation. We need to trust that audiences will make better decisions when consuming and disseminating information if they have the tools to do so.
This is why our application called Troovr is based on the idea of context management. It is designed to show the whole picture, including the gaps and biases of the information environment. It not only has features to break the information bubble, but it optimises content discoverability and teaches users how to spot misinformation, find reliable alternatives and come back to their communities improving the quality of the debate. Troovr is a privacy-first decentralised application that scans the environment and isolates bad information into clusters. At the same time, it gives power back to the users to decide what to do with their most valuable asset: their data.
At this point you probably noticed that it’s no longer “I”, but “we”. We are a team that is growing.
This is a very complex challenge and we need a diverse team to build it with us. After discussing the project with users, journalists, software engineers, innovators of different backgrounds the idea has been refined to the point that we got the attention of a world-class Data Science research institution. We are in the final stages of securing a partnership with them to build our prototype.
We are forming a team to deliver the project and the first opportunity that is open is for a software engineer or full-stack developer to oversee all technical aspects and lead the delivery of our infrastructure. They will be our first point of contact with the partner research institution and should have a solid knowledge of Python, JavaScript and NodeJS enough to handle databases, internal and 3rd party APIs and cloud infrastructure (Azure or AWS). This is an 18-month paid position (salary according to experience), but what we really aim for is to form a long-term partnership with someone who could be with us for the foreseeable future, taking us to the following stages through to MVP and beyond. If you think this is you, don’t hesitate: send an email to andre[at]troovr.com or filling our landing page form. There is just one catch: the person must be living in the UK, for legal reasons.
Misinformation is not really a new problem, but the scale it reached demands a strong response that can only be given by bringing communities together with the power of creative technology. That’s what we are trying to do.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
