Meet Lyric Jain, Founder And CEO Of Logically

About Logically

Logically is a technology company combining advanced AI with human intelligence and expertise to tackle harmful and problematic online content at scale. Founded in 2017, Logically’s mission has been to protect democratic debate and process, and provide access to trustworthy information. It offers a suite of products and services, including a new cutting-edge threat intelligence platform, to reduce and eventually eliminate the harm caused by the spread of misinformation and targeted disinformation campaigns.

With an award-winning international team of over 120 data scientists, engineers, analysts, developers and investigators, and offices in the UK and India, Logically has seen significant growth over the past year due, in part, to the surge in misinformation experienced during the pandemic.

How Did You Come Up With The Idea For Logically?

There were two real watershed moments for me back in 2016: the US presidential elections and the UK Brexit referendum. I was studying engineering at the time and started looking into how AI could be used to assess the veracity and credibility of online information. I saw the amount of contradictory information circulating in the run-up to both of these events and wanted to find a way to help people differentiate between trustworthy and untrustworthy sources, so they could make informed decisions in the polling booths.

This led to Logically, which I founded in 2017 with the mission to provide everyone with the tools they need to identify and disarm damaging and misleading information. We do this by combining advanced AI with human intelligence to tackle harmful and problematic online content at scale.

How Did The Pandemic Affect Your Ideas For Logically?

The pandemic really shifted and in some ways accelerated our plans for 2020. From March 2020, the amount of Covid-related misinformation exploded and over the past year we’ve seen it morph and get absorbed into wider anti-state and anti-authority conspiracy movements.

The scale of the misinformation challenge, and therefore our workload, expanded dramatically. We had to grow rapidly and scale up our operations in order to be able to handle the volume of questionable content and fact-check requests, including training our AI models to recognise a huge amount of new pandemic-related language. Our work took on a new dimension and we are currently still working with government bodies around the world to detect and debunk harmful Covid misinformation and support vaccine rollouts.

What Can We Hope To See From Logically In The Future?

The problem of misinformation is not going away and we certainly see a lot of growth over the next few years as demand for our services continues to rise. With social media becoming most people’s official news source, it is now more important than ever to empower people, platforms and policymakers to identify and disarm misleading content – whether it is health-related, climate-related, interfering with elections or democratic process, or aggravating societal divisions.

This is why, with our new threat intelligence platform, we are focusing on working with governments, organisations and corporations where we can have a larger-scale impact in these areas. We’re also continuing to invest in research so that our technology can meet the newer and emerging challenges we’re seeing from bad actors in this space, such as coordinated influence operations and manipulation of multimedia such as video and audio.