What my feed wanted me to see. What other people wanted me to see. What governments wanted me to see. True or false — most days, I couldn't tell anymore.
So I started building this.
Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews at RAND Corporation called it the Firehose of Falsehood. They were studying state propaganda, but the model describes what your feed does every morning now.
High-volume and multichannel. Rapid, continuous, and repetitive. Lacks commitment to objective reality. Lacks commitment to consistency.Source — RAND Corporation, 2016 →
Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in January 2025.
The largest social platform on earth removed the human layer that flagged false content. The reason given was “too many mistakes, too much censorship.”
Source — Meta Newsroom, Jan 2025 →Generative AI made fabrication cheap.
A single person with a laptop can now produce hours of plausible video, thousands of articles, a million posts — for the cost of a coffee. The supply curve broke.
One platform pulled the brakes. The other side stepped on the gas. Same year.
It moves at the speed of a swipe. It costs nothing to deploy. It decides elections, triggers mobs, moves markets. It convinces your aunt that the cancer drug doesn't work and the snake oil does.
The people producing it get faster, cheaper, and harder to trace every month. The people consuming it — us — have the same five seconds we always had to decide what's real.
That asymmetry is the problem.
Double-tap the back of your iPhone on anything — a post, a video, a screenshot, a headline — and get a verdict with sources in seconds.
Not a truth oracle. Not the final word. A fast, sourced second opinion you can run on anything, anywhere, without leaving the app you're in.
We're not trying to win the firehose. We're trying to give one person, one screen, one moment — the chance to ask is that real? and actually find out.
— Naman, building from Vancouver