“(Logically) is one of a family of tools to fight real civic challenges — the polarization of the left and the right, the echo chamber phenomenon of social media,” says Joost Bonson, an MIT lecturer who co-taught the Developmental Ventures program in which Jain, the man behind Logically, first developed his plan for combating misinformation with tech.
Early on, the company was “fairly agnostic,” Jain says, waiting to see whether machines or people could better fact-check the world. Ultimately, they settled on a combination of AI (to review more than 500,000 articles a day) and fact-checkers, many with journalism backgrounds (for more specific tasks). As of last year, Logically had around 30 employees in the U.K., mostly working in data science and artificial intelligence, with plans to expand its mostly fact-checking staff members in India to 70 people after announcing a $7 million seed funding round.
Logically examined global political content in 2019, finding that 12 to 14 percent of articles about the U.K. and Indian elections were unreliable and identifying tens of thousands of fake news pieces. During India’s state elections, Logically worked with the Maharashtra Cyber police and the state’s election commission to identify online disinformation that could lead to voter suppression.
In July, Logically entered the U.S. market with a fact-checking browser extension. It was followed quickly by a news curation app of the same name, which provides detailed summaries for storylines within articles and allows users to send their own fact checks of “any fact in any story” to the Logically team, which may then adopt the check broadly.
