{"id":26387,"date":"2021-09-21T12:29:20","date_gmt":"2021-09-21T12:29:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rbsitsoftwaresolution.com\/blog\/blackbird-ai-grabs-10m-to-help-brands-counter-disinformation.html"},"modified":"2021-09-21T12:29:20","modified_gmt":"2021-09-21T12:29:20","slug":"blackbird-ai-grabs-10m-to-help-brands-counter-disinformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/blackbird-ai-grabs-10m-to-help-brands-counter-disinformation.html","title":{"rendered":"Blackbird.AI grabs $10M to help brands counter disinformation"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York-based Blackbird.AI<\/a> has closed a $10 million Series A as it prepares to launched the next version of its disinformation intelligence platform this fall.<\/p>\n

The Series A is led by Dorilton Ventures, along with new investors including Generation Ventures, Trousdale Ventures, StartFast Ventures <\/span>and Richard Clarke, former chief counter-terrorism advisor for the National Security Council. Existing investor NetX also participated.<\/p>\n

Blackbird says it\u2019ll be used to scale up to meet demand in new and existing markets, including by expanding its team and spending more on product dev.<\/p>\n

The 2017-founded startup sells software as a service targeted at brands and enterprises managing risks related to malicious and manipulative information \u2014 touting the notion of defending the \u201cauthenticity\u201d of corporate marketing.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s applying a range of AI technologies to tackle the challenge of filtering and interpreting emergent narratives from across the Internet to identify disinformation risks targeting its customers. (And, for the record, this Blackbird is no relation to an earlier NLP startup, called Blackbird, which was acquired by Etsy back in 2016<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Blackbird AI is focused on applying automation technologies to detect malicious\/manipulative narratives \u2014 so the service aims to surface emerging disinformation threats for its clients, rather than delving into the tricky task of attribution. <\/span>On that front it\u2019s only looking at what it calls \u201ccohorts\u201d (or \u201ctribes\u201d) of online users \u2014 who may be manipulating information collectively, for a shared interest or common goal (talking in terms of groups like antivaxxers or \u201cbitcoin bros\u201d).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Blackbird CEO and co-founder Wasim Khaled says the team has chalked up five years of RD and \u201cgranular model development\u201d to get the product to<\/span> where it is now.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn terms of technology the way we think about the company today is an AI-driven disinformation and narrative intelligence platform,\u201d he tells TechCrunch. \u201cThis is essentially the efforts of five years of very in-depth, ears to the ground research and development that has really spanned people everywhere from the comms industry to national security to enterprise and Fortune 500,\u00a0 psychologists, journalists.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve just been non-stop talking to the stakeholders, the people in the trenches \u2014 to understand where their problem sets really are. And, from a scientific empirical method, how do you break those down into its discrete parts? Automate pieces of it, empower and enable the individuals that are trying to make decisions out of all of the information disorder that we see happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first version of Blackbird\u2019s SaaS was released in November 2020 but the startup isn\u2019t disclosing customer numbers as yet. v2 of the platform will be launched this November, per Khaled.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A<\/span>lso today it\u2019s announcing a partnership with PR firm,<\/span> Weber Shandwick, to provide support to customers on how to respond to specific malicious messaging that <\/span>could impact their businesses and which its platform has flagged up as an emerging risk.<\/span><\/p>\n

Disinformation has of course become a much labelled and discussed feature of online life in recent years, although it\u2019s hardly a new (human) phenomenon. (See, for example, the orchestrated airbourne leaflet propaganda drops used during war to spread unease among enemy combatants and populations). However it\u2019s fair to say that the Internet has supercharged the ability of intentionally bad\/bogus content to spread and cause reputational and other types of harms.<\/p>\n

Studies show<\/a> the speed of online travel of \u2018fake news\u2019 (as this stuff is sometimes also called) is far greater than truthful information. And there the ad-funded business models of mainstream social media platforms are implicated since their commercial content-sorting algorithms are incentivized to amplify stuff that\u2019s more engaging to eyeballs, which isn\u2019t usually the grey and nuanced truth.<\/p>\n

Stock and crypto trading is another growing incentive for spreading disinformation \u2014 just look at the recent example<\/a> of Walmart targeted with a fake press release suggesting the retailer was about to accept litecoin.<\/p>\n

All of which makes countering disinformation look like a growing business opportunity.<\/p>\n

Earlier this summer, for example, another stealthy startup in this area, ActiveFence<\/a>, uncloaked to announce a $100M funding round. Others in the space include Primer<\/a> and Yonder (previously New Knowledge<\/a>), to name a few.<\/p>\n

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ActiveFence comes out of the shadows with $100M in funding and tech that detects online harm, now valued at $500M+<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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\u00a0<\/p>\n

While some other earlier players in the space got acquired by some of the tech giants wrestling with how to clean up their own disinformation-ridden platforms \u2014 such as UK-based Fabula AI<\/a>, which was bought by Twitter in 2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another \u2014 Bloomsbury AI<\/a> \u2014 was acquired by Facebook. And the tech giant now routinely tries to put its own spin on its disinformation problem by publishing reports that contain a snapshot of what it dubs \u201ccoordinated inauthentic behavior\u201d that it\u2019s found happening on its platforms (although Facebook\u2019s selective transparency often raises more questions than it answers.)<\/p>\n

The problems created by bogus online narratives ripple far beyond key host and spreader platforms like Facebook \u2014 with the potential to impact scores of companies and organizations, as well as democratic processes.<\/p>\n

But while disinformation is a problem that can now scale everywhere online and affect almost anything and anyone, Blackbird is concentrating on selling its counter tech to brands and enterprises \u2014 targeting entities with the resources to pay to shrink reputational risks posed by targeted disinformation.<\/p>\n

Per Khaled, Blackbird\u2019s product \u2014 which consists of an enterprise dashboard and an underlying data processing engine \u2014 is not just doing data aggregation, either; the startup is in the business of intelligently structuring the threat data its engine gathers, he says, arguing too that it goes further than some rival offerings that are doing NLP (natural language processing) plus maybe some \u201clight sentiment analysis\u201d, as he puts it.<\/p>\n

Although NLP is also key area of focus for Blackbird, along with network analysis \u2014 and doing things like looking at the structure of botnets.<\/p>\n

But the suggestion is Blackbird goes further than the competition by merit of considering a wider range of factors to help identify threats to the \u201cintegrity\u201d of corporate messaging. (Or, at least, that\u2019s its marketing pitch.)<\/p>\n

Khaled says the platform focuses on five \u201csignals\u201d to help it deconstruct the flow of online chatter related to a particular client and their interests \u2014 which he breaks down thusly: Narratives, networks, cohorts, manipulation and deception. And for each area of focus Blackbird is applying a cluster of AI technologies, according to Khaled.<\/p>\n

But while the aim is to leverage the power of automation to tackle the scale of the disinformation challenge that businesses now face, Blackbird isn\u2019t able to do this purely with AI alone; expert human analysis remains a component of the service \u2014 and Khaled notes that, for example, it can offer customers (human) disinformation analysts to help them drill further into their disinformation threat landscape.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat really differentiates our platform is we process all five of these signals in tandem and in near real-time to generate what you can think of almost as a composite risk index that our clients can weigh, based on what might be most important to them, to rank the most important action-oriented information for their organization,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cReally it\u2019s this tandem processing \u2014 quantifying the attack on human perception that we see happening; what we think of as a cyber attack on human perception \u2014 how do you understand when someone is trying to shift the public\u2019s perception? About a topic, a person, an idea. Or when we look at corporate risk, more and more, we see when is a group or an organization or a set of accounts trying to drive public scrutiny against a company for a particular topic.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes those topics are already in the news but the property that we want our customers or anybody to understand is when is something being driven in a manipulative manner? Because that means there\u2019s an incentive, a motive, or an unnatural set of forces\u2026 acting upon the narrative being spread far and fast.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been working on this, and only this, and early on decided to do a purpose-built system to look at this problem. And that\u2019s one of the things that really set us apart,\u201d he also suggests, adding: \u201cThere are a handful of companies that are in what is shaping up to be a new space \u2014 but often some of them were in some other line of work, like marketing or social and they\u2019ve tried to build some models on top of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor bots \u2014 and for all of the signals we talked about \u2014 I think the biggest challenge for many organizations if they haven\u2019t completely purpose built from scratch like we have\u2026 you end up against certain problems down the road that prevent you from being scalable. Speed becomes one of the biggest issues.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of the largest organizations we\u2019ve talked to could in theory product the signals \u2014 some of the signals that I talked about before \u2014 but the lift might take them ten to 12 days. Which makes it really unsuited for anything but the most forensic reporting, after things have kinda gone south\u2026 What you really need it in is two minutes or two seconds. And that\u2019s where \u2014 from day one \u2014 we\u2019ve been looking to get.\u201d<\/p>\n

As well as brands and enterprises with reputational concerns \u2014 such as those whose activity intersects with the ESG space; aka \u2018environmental, social and governance\u2019 \u2014 Khaled claims investors are also interested in using the tool for decision support, adding: \u201cThey want to get the full picture and make sure they\u2019re not being manipulated.\u201d<\/p>\n

At present, Blackbird\u2019s analysis focuses on emergent disinformation threats \u2014 aka \u201cnowcasting\u201d \u2014 but the goal is also to push into disinformation threat predictive \u2014 to help prepare clients for information-related manipulation problems before they occur. Albeit there\u2019s no timeframe for launching that component yet.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn terms of counter measurement\/mitigation, today we are by and large a detection platform, starting to bridge into predictive detection as well,\u201d says Khaled, adding: \u201cWe don\u2019t take the word predictive lightly. We don\u2019t just throw it around so we\u2019re slowly launching the pieces that really are going to be helpful as predictive.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur AI engine trying to tell [customers] where things are headed, rather than just telling them the moment it happens\u2026 based on \u2014 at least from our platform\u2019s perspective \u2014 having ingested billions of posts and events and instances to then pattern match to something similar to that that might happen in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people just plot a path based on timestamps \u2014 based on how quickly something is picking up. That\u2019s not prediction for Blackbird,\u201d he also argues. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen other organizations call that predictive; we\u2019re not going to call that predictive.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the nearer term, Blackbird has some \u201cinteresting\u201d counter measurement tech to assist teams in its pipeline, coming in Q1 and Q2 of 2022, Khaled adds.<\/p>\n

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False news spreads faster than truth online thanks to human nature<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/I-jiRlEj9Gc\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York-based Blackbird.AI has closed a $10 million Series A as it prepares to launched the next version of its disinformation intelligence platform this fall. The Series A is led <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-26387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t