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Aron D\u2019Souza,<\/span> the brainchild behind the lawsuit<\/a> to kill Gawker Media, says he wants to fix journalism. To that end, in the spring he launched a platform that he described as a \u201cprivate AI tribunal\u201d to adjudicate the veracity of media claims.<\/p>\n \u201cToday, anyone can publish allegations. Almost no one can afford to challenge them. Objection changes that. It gives everyone a fast, affordable, evidence-based way to dispute statements in the media,\u201d the platform\u2019s homepage read until late May. Then, the site was unceremoniously taken down, not long after The Intercept\u2019s interview with D\u2019Souza.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cDue to feedback we\u2019re rebuilding for an epistemic and primary sourced future,\u201d Objection\u2019s site<\/a>, which features an uncanny AI-animated image of a painterly woman\u2019s shifting eyes, now reads. \u201cStay tuned for updates.\u201d<\/p>\n The platform itself was something of a mishmash between Snopes.com for right-wing culture war issues and a private defamation arbitration service marketed to the everyman. Among the claims it was adjudicating was whether Joe Rogan promoted the use of \u201chorse dewormer\u201d ivermectin as a Covid-19 cure and claims by Sen. Bernie Sanders that Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.<\/p>\n It\u2019s deeply unclear how many everyday people need easy access to defamation remedies; the lawsuit that eventually killed Gawker was brought on behalf of the professional wrestling star Hulk Hogan and funded<\/a> by billionaire Peter Thiel, who is also one of the backers<\/a> of Objection. But when I caught up with D\u2019Souza, an Oxford-educated lawyer, to discuss the project which has been criticized for its possible impacts on press freedom, he was awash in populist rhetoric.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think anyone is actually happy with the state of journalism,\u201d he told me. \u201cMy view is that someone needs to structurally fix journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n When I asked why he shuttered the site, D\u2019Souza pointed to sky-high demand.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter launch, we received many customer requests for more complex investigations (with much higher willingness to pay),\u201d he said. \u201cAs such, we decided to focus the team on retooling the website.\u201d<\/p>\n When I first spoke with D\u2019Souza shortly after launch, he was fresh off ringing the opening bell for the IPO of his other venture<\/a>, which includes the Enhanced Games, a kind of Olympics where all manner of performance-enhancing drugs<\/a> were allowed. We spoke about his views on the press and how he hopes his controversial Objection AI platform will reform the media.<\/p>\n There isn\u2019t much that D\u2019Souza points out that isn\u2019t already obvious to most casual observers of the state of news media. Journalists are underpaid. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of unimaginable why you would go to Columbia Journalism School and get half a million dollars in debt and then get paid $50,000 to write at The Huffington Post,\u201d he said. The business model for most publishers \u201chas completely fallen apart.\u201d And \u201cthe people who are being written about,\u201d he said, \u201caren\u2019t very happy because they feel like they\u2019re being represented incorrectly.\u201d<\/p>\n On top of all of that, the editorial boards of the largest mainstream media outlets, owned by a handful of elite families, reflect their own biases \u2014 whether it\u2019s the Sulzberger family, who owns the New York Times, or the Murdochs<\/a>, the News Corp scions who own Fox News<\/a> and the Wall Street Journal.<\/p>\n \u201cYou walk into that building on 6th Avenue in New York and you feel the presence of Rupert Murdoch, as you\u2019re aware. You walk into the Daily Mail building on Kensington High Street in London, you feel the presence of the Rothermere family. In a more subtle way, you walk into the New York Times building, and you feel the presence of the Sulzbergers,\u201d D\u2019Souza said.<\/p>\n According to him, that concentrated, elite media ownership class has contributed to a compounding, historic crisis that threatens the credibility of journalism as a whole. Just 28 percent of Americans trust the media, according to a 2025 Gallup survey<\/a>, the lowest it\u2019s ever been. Republicans, who are traditionally the partisan group with the lowest trust in media, have remained that way (6\u201317 percent) but curiously, now only a slim majority of Democrats \u2014 51 percent \u2014 say they trust traditional media. For all intents and purposes, D\u2019Souza\u2019s got much of the diagnosis right. It\u2019s his solution that\u2019s the problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n The centerpiece of Objection is what the company calls its \u201cHonor Index,\u201d a rating system that purports to tell how credible a journalist is. Here\u2019s how it works: For a fee of $2,500 to $5,000 (depending where on the website you looked), anyone can file an Objection. After that, your case is investigated by what the platform describes as \u201cthe most qualified researchers,\u201d which it says include award-winning investigative journalists, former CIA and FBI agents, and military intelligence officers.<\/p>\n The resulting investigation purportedly identifies the factual claims that require investigating, and adjudicates evidence by its \u201cproximity to the underlying event.\u201d Primary sources, documents, court filings, emails, and transaction records are valued at the highest premium. Anonymous sources \u201clacking a traceable origin\u201d rank lowest. Once the investigators have gathered their \u201cevidence\u201d and offered the journalist in question an opportunity to reply, a proprietary AI system makes a judgment on the quality of the claim. The goal, ostensibly, is greater transparency into the business of newsgathering.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe actual article you publish,\u201d he told me, referring to this Intercept story, \u201cwill only include a very small percentage of the actual data that has been transmitted to you. We live in this world of infinite cloud storage, infinite AI comprehension capability. So why isn\u2019t that underlying data available?\u201d<\/p>\n On first blush, D\u2019Souza\u2019s critiques mostly track, but for the fact that much of what he is asking for is already standard practice in many newsrooms. Pick through the archives of the once formidable, now-defunct BuzzFeed News data investigations team and you\u2019ll find the underlying code<\/a> for the publication\u2019s award-winning investigation<\/a> into surveillance aircrafts used by the military and law enforcement agencies, among other stories. Most newsrooms<\/a> that practice data<\/a> journalism host GitHub pages where people can audit their code and datasets.<\/p>\n Anonymous sources are D\u2019Souza\u2019s biggest gripe. They are \u201cone of the greatest power asymmetries that exists in the modern world.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Anonymous sources, however, are D\u2019Souza\u2019s biggest gripe. They are, he said, \u201cOne of the greatest power asymmetries that exists in the modern world.\u201d By his reasoning, science doesn\u2019t use anonymous sources and is subject to peer review, so why isn\u2019t journalism held to the same standard of external oversight? <\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t take much to realize that the power differential exists in much the opposite direction. Who\u2019s more of a threat: a whistleblower speaking out about the dangers of some of the biggest companies in the world, or the powerful company with the $300 billion market<\/a> cap sitting on some of the most sophisticated surveillance architecture<\/a> in the world?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When Objection launched<\/span> in April, and up until after our conversation, D\u2019Souza said the company had seeded a list of active cases it was working on adjudicating. One case under active \u201cinvestigation\u201d before the site went dark was \u201cThe Public v. Hannah Broughton,\u201d over the statement made in the U.K.-based outlet The Mirror<\/a> that \u201cAmazon workers were forced to work around a dead colleague and told \u2018don\u2019t look.\u2019\u201d However, Broughton wasn\u2019t the originator of that claim; it was originally made by the investigative journalism outlet The Western Edge<\/a>. The Mirror had merely aggregated the publication\u2019s reporting and sourced it to the original reporter.<\/p>\n When I asked D\u2019Souza about the claim and why, while it was under investigation, the company decided to reach out to the aggregator, he responded, \u201cRepetition is not a defense to defamation in law.\u201d Publications are generally liable for republishing defamatory content. But scrutinize that investigation further, and among the evidence listed is other stories, including by People magazine, that also aggregated The Western Edge \u2014 but not the actual Western Edge story.<\/p>\n But the real irony is that the person investigating that claim for Objection is listed as an \u201canonymous investigator.\u201d When asked about fighting anonymity with more anonymity, D\u2019Souza again gestured to the \u201cpower imbalance to be reckoned with.\u201d While the case is being investigated, he said, Objection doesn\u2019t want to \u201cdisclose the name of the investigator because a rich and powerful individual might say, oh, \u2018I\u2019m going to go bribe that investigator.\u2019\u201d The investigator\u2019s name, he said, would be published when the investigation concludes.\u00a0<\/p>\n It would take an awfully credulous person to believe that the businessman behind the shuttering of Gawker has an authentic stake in \u201cfixing\u201d journalism \u2014 especially considering that D\u2019Souza described in an editor\u2019s letter once live on the site that he views Objection as a \u201cnatural extension\u201d of his and Thiel\u2019s invasion of privacy lawsuit. Even so, one might wonder how the infamous sex tape story that was Gawker\u2019s undoing would fare through Objection\u2019s proprietary AI adjudication process. After all, Hulk Hogan did have sex with Bubba the Love Sponge\u2019s wife, and Gawker did have the receipts, namely the video, to prove it.<\/p>\n Objection\u2019s AI arbitration system, in which both the aggrieved figure and the journalist would need to agree to, also seems to have a fatal flaw. In promoting the use of AI judges, D\u2019Souza cites a paper<\/a> by two University of Chicago legal scholars that suggests AI adjudicators apply the law more consistently than human judges. In one test case, AI cited judicial precedent 99 percent of the time in its decision-making versus 61 percent for human judges. But that paper also critiques that level of accuracy. The paper\u2019s authors write, \u201cAnother possibility is that GPT is actually a better judge than humans are. While many readers have argued that this is the proper reading of our results, we believe that this theory is decisively contradicted by the fact that GPT made decisions like law students<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf you allow judges that latitude, they may be more lenient to an attractive female defendant rather than to a man.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Real judges, the authors say, don\u2019t make decisions in a legal vacuum but also through the broader human context of their decisions. Asked about that conclusion, D\u2019Souza questioned whether \u201cthe goals of the law\u201d should be more \u201cinterpretive\u201d or more by \u201cthe letter of the law.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf you allow judges that latitude, they may be more lenient to an attractive female defendant rather than to a man,\u201d he said. \u201cI firmly believe that we should be reducing human bias.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
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