In today’s world, online abuse, misinformation, fraud, and other malicious content is spreading actively and getting more difficult to track. Tracking these kinds of threats has become increasingly necessary to point out threats as they are being formed. ActiveFence is one such startup that builds tech to make it easier for safety teams to identify these threats. The company recently announced having raised $100 million in Series A and Series B funding, as reported by Techcrunch.
ActiveFence says that it will use this funding to continue developing its tools and expanding its customer base. These services are used by various agencies such as social media, audio streaming, video streaming, file sharing, gaming, marketplaces, government, and brands. Due to this, these tools basically protect “billions” of users with their tools, with the sector growing annually at a steady pace.
“We take a fundamentally different approach to trust, safety and content moderation. We proactively search the darkest corners of the web and looking for bad actors in order to understand the sources of malicious content. Our customers then know what’s coming. They don’t need to wait for the damage, or for internal research teams to identify the next scam or disinformation campaign. We work with some of the most important companies in the world, but even tiny, super niche platforms have risks.”
Noam Schwartz, the co-founder and CEO of ActiveFence
How do tools like ActiveFence help with cybersecurity and moderation?
These tools work based on a set of algorithms that use machine learning and map relationships between conversations. It crawls the easy and not so easy to reach places of the internet to sniff out malicious content. It finds out such content among millions of sources using the concept of big data analytics. Customers can use this information to track or mitigate traffic on their own platforms. Thanks to this, their moderation teams also have an easier time managing the platform.
Other examples
Facebook bought Bloomsbury AI several years ago for this very purpose. Twitter also acquired Fabula and is currently working on Birdwatch to build even better tools. Earlier this year, Discord too acquired Sentropy, which is another online abuse tracker. Many large social media platforms use this technology to keep their platform secure and fully moderated.
