The Twitter announced on Monday the acquisition of AI Fabula, a British startup that created a deep learning technology to detect fake news. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but according to the statement of those involved, the company must fully join the social network, with its founders and researchers integrating internal teams of artificial intelligence development.
The acquisition comes at a time when Twitter actively works to contain the spread of fake accounts and misinformation. This is where the Fabula AI systems come in, which has developed a technology that compares the flow of sharing of fake news with real news from certified sources as a way of identifying links and profiles involved in this dissemination.
In the official statement on the acquisition, Twitter said that startup experts will join a new machine learning development team, led by Sandeep Pandey. Michael Bronstein, co-founder of Fabula AI, for example, will also be responsible for the team, along with Federico Monti, who served as head of technology for the startup.
Together, the trio will work not only on initiatives linked to fake news but also on natural language processing, recommendation systems and deep learning from telemetry. In addition, the team will be responsible for creating ethical standards to use this type of technology, linking with universities and non-governmental organizations.
Outside of fake news, the team will also work on improving other Twitter products, such as searching and recommending content to users through the Explore tab, as well as organizing the timeline and ads displayed. All, of course, based on artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies and from social network usage data.
In a statement, Bronstein said he was excited about joining Twitter and improving the quality of the conversations taking place there. In addition, he will remain with his chair of machine learning and pattern recognition at Imperial College London, which should facilitate interaction between the company and the academic segment.
As the social network did not detail the terms of the acquisition, doubts remain about the future of the Fabula AI technology, which was originally designed to be open and decentralized. Sources revealed to the international press, however, that this view may have been overlooked in favor of the greater impact of patented technology on Twitter itself. On this subject, the company just said that all are aligned in a single ideal: improving the environment and social network conversations.