Mark Little of disinfo agency Kinzen
Sunday.
The Business Post reported that The Department of Health is paying Kinzen, an Irish media tech start-up, to identify online misinformation related to Covid-19 and the Covid-19 vaccines.
Via The Business Post:
The work, which began earlier this year and consists of almost daily briefings from Kinzen to state officials, marks the first time the department has engaged the services of a third-party company to conduct work on misinformation. It is also believed to be the first time a government body in Ireland has paid a third-party company for this type of work.
Kinzen, founded by former RTÉ news journalist Mark Little and Aine Kerr in 2018, promotes itself as a service which can track disinformation campaigns online. It says it has developed its own automatic speech recognition (ASR) system which can sift through audio and video content to highlight “high risk” material. It combines this with a language model it feeds with terms which are relevant to searching for potential misinformation.
…Little said the work with the Department of Health was entirely “research-driven” and did not involve the company’s scoring system which rates content depending on the level of “risk” identified.
…Little said that all credit for Ireland’s successful rollout of the vaccine should go to public health workers and the Irish people. He said Kinzen was proud to have supported the Department of Health.
“Our role was to bring a global perspective on disinformation to the Irish environment,” he said.
“By helping public health communicators stay ahead of campaigns of disinformation, we hope we helped flatten the curve of an infodemic that deepened the impact of the Covid-19 crisis in other countries.”
Not all heroes deploy tasteless metaphors.
Kinzen briefing the Department of Health on Covid-19 online misinformation (Business Post)
Pic via Mark Little