51 – The anti-fake news social network with George Sehremelis

George Sehremelis is the founder of Overlooked.com

Episode Description

“We want to be the social news network that ends fake news.” ~ George Sehremelis, founder of Overlooked

George Sehremelis hates fake news, and he’s determined to stop it with his new website Overlooked.com. Overlooked, a company of 15 students operating in a basement at the University of Southern California, has developed several algorithms designed to expose political bias and journalistic credibility. Sehremelis tells us the story behind Overlooked, what’s wrong with Facebook and Twitter, and why he believes fake news is perhaps humanity’s biggest problem.

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Key Quotes

Overlooked.com’s founding story

“We saw in 2017 that Facebook propagated a genocide in Myanmar. Tens of thousands of people, conservatively, killed, and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. No body in America talked about it.” ~ George Sehremelis on why he started Overlooked

“That’s how the name Overlooked was formed because nobody talked about this in the American media.” ~ George Sehremelis on the naming of Overlooked

The algorithms behind it all

“The first and most important thing is we basically replaced the newsfeed with web scrapers of every major news outlet. When you do that, you block out 90% of fake news instantaneously because our users can’t post anything.” ~ George Sehremelis

“We have a machine learning algorithm which can determine the bias of a news article to the 95th percent. We run every single article through this algorithm.” ~ George Sehremelis

“We’ve actually written an algorithm, which can determine whether or not articles are tech, business, entertainment, sports, opinion. We’re going to add fake to it too for the rate 1-2% of articles on Overlooked that are journalistic errors.” ~ George Sehremelis on Overlooked.com’s latest features

Looking forward

“The vision is to built a site that, when scaled across billions and billions of people, doesn’t create genocide.” ~ George Sehremelis on the mission of Overlooked

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Bills with Luke Scorziell does not provide investment, tax, or legal advice or recommendations. This material is solely intended for educational purposes based on publicly available information and may change at any time. Additionally, this article’s content is a summary of the Interviewee’s comments and, while rephrased by the Author, are not from the Author himself.

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About Luke Scorziell

Mr. Scorziell created The Edge of Ideas when he was 15 years old. After a few years of blogging he found a passion for podcasting and now regularly has guests on his show, Bills with Luke Scorziell. He currently writes for USC Annenberg Media and produces a weekly segment on Annenberg Radio News called “Politicking.” You can find more of his work here. Find out more about Luke and his unique journey. Feel free to send Luke a message below.