About
Anti-disinfo is a project that aims to extend peoples’ digital sovereignty by leveraging open source tools for journalists and truth-tellers. It’s a conglomeration of tools and resources that aim to share the following features:
Open-source
By focusing on open-source tools we aim not just for saving money (although that is a consideration), but also for tools that don’t make their users the product. We focus on a few qualities:
Non-U.S. based platforms
Using platforms from outside the U.S. puts users outside of the CLOUD Act and provides more safety and security for journalists’ data.
Vision
Build an ecosystem that allows stakeholders to:
- Explore their own site(s) to see how their properties have been covering topics in the news
- Explore local news trends by tracking a curated list of local news sites and blogs
- Open search of all news sources
- Explore information and disinformation campaigns by tracking social media posts across networks
Tools
I’m putting together a set of open tools to help the vision. There are a lot of expensive tools out there and I want to level the playing field by deploying and maintaining their open source counterparts where possible.
Metabase
A powerful, self-hosted data visualization tool
n8n
An automation tool for complex workflows.
Kagi API
Paid search for high-quality, non-rate-limited results.
Employer, partners and friends
Colorado Public Radio
Colorado’s largest public radio station
I work as the software engineering manager for cpr.org where I help direct features on the site, work with my team to help keep the site running, and help direct our organization’s use of AI in a responsible way.
Alliance4Europe
Digital intelligence for democracy
I’m learning more about their DISRUPT framework and helping support it with some external tools. Soon I’ll be able to contributions to their codebase.
Projects
Alt-text bookmarklet
A simple bookmarklet that sits over WordPress to help producers generate alt-text for images. It relies on light-weight edge models sitting on Cloudflare’s edge to build the text.
The good: Lighter weight than WordPress’ native AI models, simple to use
The bad: Relies on Cloudflare for the models instead, not integrated as a plugin
The ugly: Light-weight models make more mistakes, which forces producers to pay more attention to the alt-text they approve. It’s still faster than starting on your own, and it keeps a human in the loop of content creation.
Mistral long transcriber
A small python script and web interface that uses Voxtral, Mistral AI’s custom transcription model.
The good: Uses a strong, lightweight EU model for transcription.
The bad: Requires that you start up a python server if you want the web interface. Also requires that you have the multimedia that you want to transcribe on your computer.
The ugly: It’s a good kind of ugly, but local models are getting better and better at transcribing, which means your data never leaves your device. Mistral long transcriber is still useful for older hardware that can’t support these lighter models.