A Vision to End the Global Information Crisis

Risk & Opportunity

The information crisis is our #1 short-term global risk.

It's a crisis that harms individuals, compromises public health, divides societies, and deeply hinders our ability to address every other global risk.

The crisis is also our most immediate opportunity: by addressing it we can empower individuals, improve society, and foster progress on all global risks.

The BigFilter Approach

We're a social impact startup dedicated to inspiring and creating solutions to the global information crisis.

Unlike many startups, we focus on both short- and long-term solutions that balance public benefit and profit.

In the short term, we're building products and platforms to help people navigate and mitigate the crisis while going about their work and their lives.

For the long term, we're co-creating the information ecosystems and economies needed for just and democratic societies in the age of AI.

Collaborate With Us

Our approach requires collaboration with a diverse range of experts across many disciplines.

If you are an expert who is passionate about how information and technology shape the present and future, we'd love to meet you.

If you'd like to keep up to date with our work:

• Subscribe to our mailing list
• Follow us on Bluesky at @bigfilter

Why are We a Public Benefit Corporation?

We aim to deliver public benefits on a scale similar to the largest technology platforms in existence today. This demands significant capital and carries significant risk.

To succeed, we must not only grow rapidly, operate sustainably, compete with incumbents, and manage risks to ourselves — we must manage the risks involved in providing powerful information networks to people around the globe (such as the Rohingya genocide and Cambridge Analytica scandal.)

For-profit corporations lack the strong governance needed to accomplish this, while non-profits have difficulty sustaining themselves at scale.

To address this, we incorporated BigFilter as Delaware Public Benefit Corporation, a modern form of corporate structure designed to balance the financial interests of investors, the best interests of stakeholders, and delivery of a specific public benefit. In our case, that public benefit is, "... to inspire & create socially-responsible, evidence-based solutions to the global information crisis."

To learn more about the structure, you can read §362 of the Delaware Code, which contains this concise and precise summary:

A “public benefit corporation” is a for-profit corporation organized under and subject to the requirements of this chapter that is intended to produce a public benefit or public benefits and to operate in a responsible and sustainable manner. To that end, a public benefit corporation shall be managed in a manner that balances the stockholders’ pecuniary interests, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the public benefit or public benefits identified in its certificate of incorporation.

Notes

Global information crisis refers to the widespread challenges we all face in recognizing and accessing accurate, trustworthy, and meaningful information. It encompasses:

• misinformation (unintentionally false or manipulative content),
• disinformation (deliberately false or manipulative content),
• information overload (excessive and overwhelming amounts of information),
• algorithmic harms (biases, manipulation & negative side-effects from automated systems), and
• related issues such as echo chambers and poor media literacy.

Collectively, these things lead to loss of life and economic damages, while also undermining trust, decision-making, and societal cohesion on a global scale.

Global risks include extreme weather events; cost of living crises; growing media consolidation; war, terrorism & other armed conflicts between states; societal polarization; natural resource shortages; supply chain disruptions; growing inequality; the erosion of human rights; emerging threats from AI and other frontier technology; and so on.