July Waitlist Update

Hello, and welcome back! This is the first of our two summer updates, and we hope it finds you well and thriving. We want to give you an update on how things are progressing and what we’re thinking about as we reach midsummer.

A key priority for us of late has been finding partners who will support our efforts to make Bright a safe, happy, interesting place to be. It’s one of the reasons we were so excited to announce our partnership with NewsGuard: not only are they an amazing team, the work they do to support trustworthy news will be a key component of Bright’s reliability and a great educational tool for younger Members who can learn about trustworthy news sources. Today, we’re happy to announce the first of several new partnerships that will be integral to our mission as well.

Marvin Gaye said to believe half of what you see and none of what you hear, and he couldn’t have put it better in the era of deepfakes and manipulated media. How, then, can we trust what we see online and know that an image, a video, or a recording is genuine? What do we do when technology has become so adept at mimicking reality that it can become a source of disruption and deceit?

That’s the question RealityDefender, our newest partner, has set out to answer by deploying cutting-edge deepfake detection tools. RD will be an essential component of Bright’s content reliability toolset. By identifying key markers that demonstrate distortion or change, RD’s system helps identify when media is faked and iterates over itself to learn to recognise fakes faster and more reliably. Frankly, it’s precisely the kind of technology you’d hope was under development in response to the avalanche of faked media we’ve seen over the past few years, and we’re very excited to integrate it into Bright.

Partnering with RD is another way that Bright is setting a new standard for content moderation online. As the only startup social network who was invited to be a signatory to the European Commission’s Code of Practice on Disinformation (CoP), we’re at the absolute forefront of the struggle for protecting information integrity and reliable, trustworthy media. The CoP is the world’s most important public-private collaboration in pursuit of safe information online, and is a meaningful step towards stemming the tide of misinformation online. The Code isn’t perfect, but as a member of most of the key working groups to emerge from the drafting process, we promise to work to make it as strong and meaningful as can be.

As the year progresses, we’ll fill you in on other relationships and steps that we’re taking to make Bright the safest place to be social online, but for now, we hope you’ll take a look at what RD is doing -- we’re sure you’ll be as impressed as we have been.

Thanks, as always, for being a part of this journey with us. Sharing news from reliable sources and building community is what we do in our updates and newsletters. It’s exactly what Bright is about, which is why we think of these touchpoints with you as a way to practice what we preach. We can’t wait for you to be able to do the same on Bright and build communities of your own. Until then, feel free to email us with questions or thoughts and, if you haven’t already, sign up for the waitlist!

Have a great few weeks -- we'll see you next month with more updates about Bright!