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Facebook和Twitter等大型社交媒体公司往往不愿放弃现有的算法和商业模式，因此难以对肆虐的假新闻痛下杀手。这给了创业公司新的机会。一批专门监控、检测虚假信息和不良内容的科技创业公司各显身手，誓与假新闻一较高下。
测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：
nuance ['njuːɑːns] n. 细微差别
phoney ['fəʊni] adj. 假的，伪造的
breach [briːtʃ] n. 裂口，违背
amplify ['æmplɪfaɪ] v. 扩大，详述
trawl [trɔːl] v. 用拖网捕鱼，搜罗
阅读马上开始，建议您计算一下阅读整篇文章所用的时间，对照下方的参考值就可以评估出您的英文阅读水平。
When Adam Hildreth started Dubit, an early social network for children during the last tech boom, he never imagined that he would end up at the forefront of fighting fake news influencing elections.
The teen entrepreneur of 1999 has grown up to become the chief executive of Crisp, trying to apply what he learnt moderating cyberbullying to stop the spread of terrorist content online, and now experimenting with how to combat misinformation campaigns.
Crisp helps brands protect their reputation on social media, using an algorithm to trawl the internet, including the dark web, to understand who is distributing content online.
While large internet companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter struggle to find ways to stop the spread of misinformation online without abandoning their algorithms or business models, smaller start-ups are looking for ways to help clients willing to pay for extra help fighting fake news.
Some such as Crisp or New Knowledge started out fighting terrorism. Others such as Cisco and Digital Shadows are seeing the parallels with cyber security, using tactics developed to defend against hackers to battle against fake news.
“The big challenge is that so much is uploaded every minute,” Mr Hildreth says.
Crisp also helps brands look for anything that could damage their reputation, including real or fake news.
Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a start-up based in Austin, Texas, was a professional blogger who became an expert on Isis's use of social mediA.Now he is trying to help companies, political campaigns and social justice organisations understand how online communities can be manipulated.
New Knowledge has seen revenues double in the past six months since it started focusing on misinformation. It uses machine learning technology to identify bots and break down different topics of conversation to spot where people are able to change the language used to discuss a topic, a sign that a community may be changing its beliefs.
Cisco, the networking equipment company with a large cyber security arm, won a Fake News Challenge to design technologies that can help people detect the “stance” of a news article.
Researchers used natural language processing, whereby a computer is taught to understand the nuances of human speech, to detect whether a headline is related to the body of the text because many fake news stories copy the model of clickbait to lure people to visit a website. The team won by combining machine learning techniques, which are inspired by biological processes, including decision trees, a predictive modelling approach.
Digital Shadows, a San Francisco and London-based cyber security company, specialises in understanding what hackers are doing on the dark weB.Companies often turn to the company to monitor if, for example, large databases full of their customer data were for sale, evidence that they have experienced a security breach. It combines technology with threat intelligence analysts, some with military backgrounds and many of whom speak foreign languages.
Alastair Paterson, chief executive of Digital Shadows, says the fake news that was spread during the US election used similar techniques as hacking groups.
“There's an interesting crossover between social media and cyber security right now more than ever before,” he says. “Social networks have so far been very impotent in doing anything about it.”
Digital Shadows counts broadcasters among its clients. For some of the largest organisations, it has identified and issued takedown notices for fake websites and social media accounts in more than 100 separate incidents.
For other companies, it also finds fake domains and social media profiles. It once found an entire phoney arm of a Dutch company that had been set up online.
Distil Networks is another cyber security company with skills that could help solve the problems faced by social mediA.The company specialises in detecting bots, often used to amplify a message in the hope that it trends online.
Edward Roberts, director of product marketing at Distil Networks, says bots are becoming increasingly clever as they learn to evade detection by mimicking human behaviour. “They are pausing on pages for random periods of time, they are clicking through at different rates, they are moving their mouse in less automated ways.”
But he says, it is good that social media platforms have realised they have a problem because they can find ways to identify bots in the same way they tag rogue messages and emails as spam.
“Now today, we rarely see spam, it all goes to the spam folder,” he says. “It is probably not an existential threat they are dealing with.”
请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：
A.a social network site for children.
B.an online brand management company.
C.a social media app for children.
D.a London-based cyber security company.
答案 (1)
A.Crisp is an Austin-based tech start-up founded by Adam Hildreth.
B.Crisp uses machine learning technology to identify misinformation.
C.Crisp was originally a brand management company based in London.
D.Crisp has started out fighting terrorist content and misinformation.
答案 (2)
A.Digital Shadows.
B.Cisco.
C.Distil Networks.
D.New Knowledge.
答案 (3)
A.They learn and imitate human behaviour.
B.They use machine learning technologies.
C.They combine technology with intelligence analysts.
D.They study biological processes to create fake news.
答案 (4)
(1) 答案：A.a social network site for children.解释：Adam Hildreth在上一次互联网泡沫时创办了儿童社交网络Dubit。如今这位1999年的青少年创业家已经成为了Crisp的首席执行官。
(2) 答案：D.Crisp has started out fighting terrorist content and misinformation.解释：Crisp试图用缓解网络欺凌的手段来阻止网上恐怖主义信息的传播，现在也在试验如何打击假新闻宣传。
(3) 答案：B.Cisco.解释：拥有大型网络安全部门的软件公司Cisco设计了一种帮助人检测新闻文章立场的技术，并赢得了“假新闻挑战”。
(4) 答案：A.They learn and imitate human behaviour.解释：Edward Roberts称假新闻机器人正在变得越来越聪明，他们通过模仿人类行为来逃避检测。