Aletheia wins Rep. Anna Eshoo’s 2023 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 16th District

When asked what inspired the creation of Aletheia, the students said, “We have noticed a tremendous amount of divisiveness and deadlock in today’s political environment. This plays out locally, nationally, internationally, and even in our own school or with our families. Often, we see that constructive conversation between people cannot even begin because they are so far apart on the facts. We also see that some people present false information as ‘facts’ (aka misinformation) in order to advance their cause and sneakily persuade their audience towards a particular perspective.

We began to question the lack of consensus on what is true. And we noted the fundamental importance of a free press in a functional democracy.

Our research revealed that many people were not believing what they were reading. In part, this was understandable when one considers just how much news providers vary in their biases and reliability. Even so, most readers are unwilling or unable to spend additional time trying to figure out what may or may not be true in the articles they read. True enough, performing one’s own fact-checking is a difficult and inconvenient process, so few embark on it.

We began to wonder how ‘truth’ could be quicker and easier to ascertain. We needed our solution to be highly automated (quicker) and present verdicts in the same place where readers were consuming their news (easier). This led to a browser extension as a delivery vehicle, and to the heavy use of APIs and AI to achieve automated statement validation.

With free societies at risk and people unsure of who they can trust, truth has never been more valuable. That’s why we created Aletheia, a convenient way to discover the truth wherever you read.”