Lewis Shepherd blogs about the Washington Post’s new “Truth Teller,” a technology prototype invoking powerful new technologies for journalism and democratic accountability in politics and government. Truth Teller runs an automated fact-checking algorithm against the streaming video of politicians or other talking heads and displays in real time a “True” or “False” label as they’re speaking.
This seems like it would be useful for intelligence analysts if the database and algorithms can handle other languages and global fact-checking.
From Shepherd’s blog:
The prototype was built with funding from a Knight Foundation’s Prototype Fund grant, and you can read more about the motivation and future plans over on the Knight Blog, and you can read TechCrunch discussing some of the political ramifications of the prototype based on the fact-checking movement in recent campaigns.
Even better, you can actually give Truth Teller a try here, in its infancy.
What other uses could be made of semantic “truth detection” or fact-checking, in other aspects of the relationship between the government and the governed?
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