Syed Imran Haider 
Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom – the founders of Instagram, believe they can confront rivals and prevent misinformation from spreading online by building a competitor. The duo has unveiled a new app based on news text to promote content, aiming to challenge user views.
The entrepreneurial pair is back on the market with a new company called Artifact. It is an AI-powered app to collect news and lifestyle content of users’ interest and promotes content that challenges previously held views to avoid so-called filter bubbles.
Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Metaverse, said the arrival of the new app comes as a timely moment in the tech industry, especially after Elon took over Twitter and Facebook focused on Metaverse. It is the right time to focus on the text since people pay attention to misinformation and consume news today.
Increasing Trend of Misinformation Spread over social media
The Instagram founders left Facebook amid tensions over Meta’s increasing control over its platform in 2018. It was when regulators challenged the social media company over falsification and data privacy after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Elon’s acquisition of Twitter, followed by a downsizing of half of its employees, including some in trust and safety teams, hurt monitoring and policing misinformation.
According to Kevin Systrom, Artifact will compete with Twitter for news and lifestyle content. He also admired the Tesla owner for turning around a flagging corporate, saying despite some overlaps in a specific area, Twitter is among the world’s most significant social media properties. The company deserves a leader who believes in its potential and can make it great, which Systrom has seen from Elon Musk.
Twitter’s travails show how those social media businesses face difficulties and struggles as their investments in advertising did not work well. Besides Meta, Alphabet, the owner company of Snap and YouTube, has fired thousands of employees in the past few months, citing an upsetting economic environment.
Self-Funded Artifact
All these headwinds have failed to daunt the co-founder of Instagram, who and his partner Krieger spent single-digit millions in building Artifact in the past two years. The San Francisco-based company has seven workers. It indicates that Artifact wants to avoid the funding crunch that may hit venture capital.
Systrom said he was sure of the success of Instagram from day one, which also helped the duo to raise money quickly. It taught them a lesson that one should have investors as much as they recruit their workers, and they should make wise and careful decisions.
The business duo has plenty of funds in the bank. They focus on making a product with the ability to retain users. Artifact employs Machine Learning to examine a curated directory of publishers’ sites, including news organizations and small blogs covering specialist interests.
The app allows you to use the product more frequently to make the algorithm more personalized. You can message private messages and follow other users as a part of the features under the testing process.
The platform may show a personalized ad to users willing to enjoy free-of-cost access to content. It will also bring paid options, including deals and subscriptions with publishers. The business duo aims to keep Artifact as a curated pack of approved sources instead of making it a social media platform to ensure high-quality news and content.
The company approves websites by screening them via a media preference and fact-checking approach. While users may not like the content occasionally delivered by the algorithm, dedicating some part of the feed to tangential interest and other sides of the issue is also essential, Systrom added.
