This project will only be funded if at least $50,000 is pledged by .
We're Syft and we're here to make this election cycle like nothing else before it. Too many politicians get away with saying anything they want without being called out on it. There are fact checkers that do great work, but most people don't have time or energy to follow up.
That's where Syft comes in. We're building a full service to fact check politicians in real time. You'll be able to go to www.syft.org: and see any political event with fact checks right as the candidates speak. It's a bit like pop-up video from the 90s. So much so that we made this really cheesy video in our garage to highlight the comparison:
Right now the site is functional but we're still working out the bugs in our live fact checking application. Today when you go on the site you can see an example of what the the site is about.
You can watch videos that have been checked manually by our team and as you watch, facts and links will come up alongside the video when they're relevant in a nice little sidebar. The goal is to inform without distracting. Choosing leaders is a serious responsibility, one that we take very seriously. We're here to give you all the information quickly and effectively, so we can all make a well thought out decision.
The Syft team’s mission is to change the currency that politics and media deal in, from sensationalism, to truth. Too often it feels like the major sources of news let politicians say anything, the more absurd the better. And this makes sense given their incentives. Money values things that grab eyeballs. We’re working to change what grabs eyeballs because we believe deeply, that people want the truth more than they want to be riled up by falsehoods and exaggerations. We’re working to make the truth accessible and digestible for everyone. So we don’t have to settle for sensational media-packaged soundbites. We can have the news, and the eye-catching clips, but with hard hitting facts alongside, not in the background.
We were born out of the frustration of watching the TV, knowing that someone is full of crap, but not knowing why. Or knowing why something is untrue but worried that someone else doesn’t know it, and they’re getting sucked into the web. It’s too easy to let this frustration make us cynics. We chose the harder route: we’re here trying to do something about it for all those who don’t have the time or energy to climb this mountain. This isn’t to seem obnoxious and inspirational-meme-ey, we’re really just fed up waiting for this to happen and we’re at a place in our lives where we can take risks and dedicate inordinate amounts of time to fact checking and trying to fix the way this whole thing works.
We dream of a world where politicians think twice about lying on television. We imagine a world where it is no longer politically expedient to repeat a debunked talking point. In this scenario, Syft is taken to the national stage and politicians are scared to lie on television because they know there will be a false right next to their face. In this world, experts can’t talk in circles throwing endless jargon at the viewer because Syft will explain what’s happened in plain english right next to their head. We’re shooting for a hopeful world where people can watch like experts and politicians have to earn their place with trustworthiness and sound ideas rather than lies and spin.
If you couldn't already tell, we're a scrappy team, much better at politics and code than we are at advertising and media. And we're running out of money right at the time when we need the most help. We need your help to fund putting the finishing touches on our software and to pay our selfless researchers for their work as we scale up. More importantly than any of that, we need the money to put a nice design shine on Syft so the people will put it on screen, so everyone will want to watch it, so it's easier to share and publish.
We're making a big ask, but we wouldn't ask for it if we didn't need it. To finish off our software in time for the election, we need money for our developers. And of course, our researchers need to eat, sometimes. We mostly live on Ramen though, so that doesn't take much. The rest goes to internet advertising, and a beautiful facelift so that other people can learn that we exist.
Thanks for reading, and for all your help bringing honesty back to politics.
Our team is the thing we're most proud of. This is a crazy challenging project, which is why no one has done it before. We have the team to make it happen. Our researchers all have academic specialties in politics from some of the world's top universities. On top of that, our developers are top notch. They have masters degrees and PhDs in machine learning and natural language processing and almost 100 years of development experience between them.
I believe in them, and I think most reasonable people do too. We are in a race against the clock, so the sooner we get funded (and the more we raise) the better our chances are to roll this out the way America deserves. We're forging a path that hasn't been forged before and we'll need as much help as we can to deal with the challenges that come up as we finish building our live platform.
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