James Murdoch, the younger son of Rupert Murdoch, is making a seven-figure investment in start-ups aimed at combating fake news, only weeks after criticising his father’s news outlets for promoting false scepticism about climate change.
Lupa Systems, James Murdoch’s holding company, has partnered with Betaworks, an early investor in social media companies including Twitter, to fund an accelerator for start-ups to tackle disinformation and foster a “more sustainable news ecosystem”.
Since the break-up of his family’s entertainment empire, Mr Murdoch has charted his own course, promoting environmental causes and distancing himself from the conservative politics of his father’s news brands.
After last year stepping down as chief executive of 21st Century Fox, Mr Murdoch has used the $2bn he received from the break-up of the family empire to launch Lupa and assemble his own portfolio of companies, acquiring stakes in Vice Media and the Tribeca Film Festival.
Mr Murdoch’s partnership with Betaworks is aimed at another cause he feels strongly about: disinformation online. Lupa and Betaworks are pouring millions into the effort. They plan to invest $100,000 into each early stage start-up, with the goal of finding between 10 and 20 companies to fund in the next year.
The accelerator programme, called Betalab, aims to build software that can be used to authenticate videos or people and identify deep fakes, disinformation and trolls in media production. It will also include workshops and events to encourage start-up activity in the space.
Algorithmically-generated and manipulated media such as deepfakes are on course to “open new possibilities for storytelling, but also to undermine our collective relationship with truth and reality”, Mr Murdoch told the Financial Times. The Betalab project will “create a platform from which we can begin to learn how to navigate the blurred reality of our synthetic and natural worlds”, he said.
“The economic argument for creating disinformation is really clear. It’s inexpensive and you can generate a massive impact,” said Ben FitzGerald, partner at Lupa Systems, who says he and Mr Murdoch have been concerned about this for “a number of years”.
The men met in 2015 when Mr Murdoch joined the board of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think-tank. Mr Murdoch last year funded a CNAS initiative to curb the threat of authoritarian regimes who use technology to undermine democracy.
“I’m hoping that we can help catalyse a lot of difficult conversations about the effects of technology and disinformation . . . on different areas of our society,” said Betaworks founder John Borthwick, a former AOL executive.
Betaworks, whose early investors included Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer and AOL’s Tim Armstrong, has backed or developed social media services including TweetDeck, a Twitter client bought by Twitter, and Bit.ly, a web-address shortening service.
The tensions within the Murdoch family came to the surface in January as bushfires tore through Australia, the original home to Rupert Murdoch’s news outlets. In a rare public rebuke, James and his wife Kathryn aired their disappointment with News Corp coverage in Australia for its “ongoing denial” of global warming.
News Corp owns a stable of newspapers while Fox owns its namesake news channel, which features commentators such as Laura Ingraham, who has compared the teenage activist Greta Thunberg to a cult leader.
