James Mawhinney
James Mawhinney
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Australian entrepreneur James Mawhinney is launching a new global technology platform that will enable users to address misinformation, by giving individuals and businesses a ‘right of reply’.
The media-tech platform has been two years in the making and will allow profile holders to respond to what is written and said about them, and confront misinformation with their position.
Mr Mawhinney – a global private equity investor who has made investments across more than ten countries – said the scourge of misinformation was eroding trust in the media and governments, and victims of misinformation campaigns need a way to respond.
“The media can destroy a personal or corporate reputation with misinformation, often innocently, and the victims don’t have a way to fight back,” said Mr Mawhinney. “This is the problem we have set out to solve. Reputation management is an untapped market which no one has adequately addressed to date.”
“We’ve developed a platform where users have the power to respond to all forms of media,” says Mawhinney, who is launching the service from his global investment vehicle, Kismet Group.
Early interest has come from the science community which wants the ability to publish factual rejoinders to popular narratives carried in the media.
“Scientists who see inaccurate claims in the media do not want to sit down and write an entire essay about it,” says Mawhinney. “They’d rather identify the misinformation and juxtapose this with real data.”
He says the idea came to him while he and his investment business – Mayfair 101 – fought a drawn-out legal battle with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), which is the Australian version of the American SEC.
The regulator went to court and sought to have Mawhinney banned for dealing in financial products, based in part on mis-readings of financial spreadsheets which showed assets had been paid for rather than misappropriated.
“We told the regulator, the media and the courts that there is a falsehood at the heart of this entire saga, but the layers of mud were almost impossible to remove,” says Mawhinney. “I started wondering why there wasn’t a platform where an individual or business could publish responses in a formal, structured manner.”
Mawhinney says there is a strong appetite for his platform as the trust for media and government plummets, as evidenced by the 2022 Gallup poll on confidence in the media.
“We are forecasting around three million users by the end of the first year,” says Mawhinney. “We have already had registrations for our waitlist from more than 35 countries within a few days.”
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