NEWTRAL · First real-time fact-checking tool to fight against the fake news and disinformation

People consume news because they need to be informed about the state-of-the-world and events around them, but 54% of citizens think that there is a serious problem regarding fake news and trust in media has decreased to the lowest-point-ever. It is very difficult for citizens to assess the credibility and veracity of news. On the other hand, citizens’ trust is crucial for news media that look for solutions to fight fake news and increase citizens’ trust. The solution is fact-checking, but fact-checking is a very time-consuming and costly task. Newtral is a startup funded in October 2017 with fact-checking as its core business becoming one of the fact-checking pioneers and the leaders in the EU. +40 people currently work in Newtral researching new ways of producing and distributing data-driven journalism in the digital era, being the biggest professional fact-checking team in the EU. Our team is behind the production of ‘El Objetivo’, the first TV-show (+1M weekly live viewers) in the EU to bring fact-checking to a TV format in prime time. Newtral is also a leading member of the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN), a community of international fact-checkers (51 members) and the only member with a TV show in prime time. ‘El Objetivo’ has been awarded with the “Best Audiovisual journalist fact-checking projects award” by the IFCN. Our ambition is to create a new market by turning professional fact-checking into a scalable and profitable business. Newtral intends to become the gold standard in the fact-checking sector by applying NLP, advance data science methods and AI to the journalism fact-checking work to semi-automate the verification allowing any fact-checking journalist to become a ‘fact-checking centaur’. SME Instrument Phase-1 and Phase-2 will be extremely beneficial in helping the company to accelerate development and market expansion of the solution, boosting the company’s growth to +100 employees and 32M€ revenues by 2024.