India’s Factly Founder Rakesh Dubbudu on Misinformation Trends, DeepSeek’s Signal to the Media Industry, and Tech Giants’ Political Allegiances

Do you believe you care about facts more than people in India? For a split second, did you notice any bias in your quick mental response?

Whom do you trust more when it comes to news: a well-established media brand or your closest friend who runs a popular current affairs YouTube channel? Who do you think is more likely to spread misinformation?

As Meta and other tech giants show their allegiance to Trump's administration and become increasingly partisan, will financial connections with these platforms become a reputational liability for the media industry?

We discuss these and many other technology, storytelling, and misinformation-related issues in this episode of AI-FLUENT with Rakesh Dubbudu, founder and CEO of India's fact-checking website, Factly.

Main Topics We Discussed in This Episode:

• How much do people in India care about facts?
• The significant silent population - they need fact-checkers, not people on the extremes
• The relationship between fact-checking websites in India: friends, competitors or enemies?
• DeepSeek: what signals does this AI tool send to the media industry?
• Censorship in Indian media
• The most frequent questions Factly's journalists ask themselves about generative AI
• Why people with generalist skills who can connect the dots will shine in the world of AI
• The biggest misconception about AI in the storytelling industry
• The biggest challenge for Factly in general and for Rakesh as CEO in particular
• Factly's relationship with Meta as a fact-checking partner after Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of fact-checking on Facebook in the US, with likely further expansion
• As Meta and other tech giants show their allegiance to Trump's administration and become increasingly partisan, will financial connections with them become a reputational liability for the media industry?
• How Factly is working to decrease its reliance on external tech platforms
• How Factly ensures unbiased data input when building their own AI tools
• How they maintain and measure public trust in their fact-checking operations amid declining trust in traditional media globally, particularly when handling politically sensitive topics in India
• The specific patterns and trends of misinformation in India
• How misinformation can be addressed holistically
• Factly's revenue model and their use of AI tools to reimagine their business model
• The book Rakesh is currently reading to better understand generative AI