Arbiter

See what shapes your feed before it shapes your views.

Swapneel Mehta · Chaitya Shah · Ethan Sheinker · Diane ChangColumbia Summer Venture Accelerator · July 31, 2026

Where there's smoke… is there fire?

SMOKE MEANT FIRE 2M+ causes autism… 1M+ autism risk… 90K MMR? unsafe… 3M+ just asking… ONE FEED causes autism… autism risk… MMR? unsafe… just asking… ENOUGH SMOKE, PEOPLE ASSUME FIRE 72% 1976 28% Sept 2025 TRUST ERODES
Sources: Hoes et al., Nature Human Behaviour 2024 · Gallup, September 2025.
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We rely on journalists to check it. They have gone dark.

What happens
events, claims, campaigns
→
Platforms and feeds
manipulation moves faster than anyone can track
✕
Journalists and fact-checkers
the check on what is real
went dark
CrowdTangle shut, 2024
Data access now costs thousands a month
✕
Communities decide
on unchecked feeds
Deception campaigns move elections, vaccination rates and policy. The check on them is gone, so the campaigns reach people directly.
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Accounts disappear before alerts appear

Romania annulled a presidential election over a coordinated TikTok operation. By the time anyone went looking, the evidence had vanished.
SOCIAL LISTENING Keywords Conversations What happened SOCIAL INVESTIGATIONS Keywords Conversations What is happening
One way. The keywords never change, so the insight arrives late.
Both ways. Conversations rewrite the keywords, so we find more.
Al Jazeera, December 2024.
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Ask in plain language; Arbiter runs the investigation

9 platforms, 50+ languages.

1 · Search
X
YouTube
Reddit
→
2 · Aggregate
Coordinated praise
44 posts · 3 platforms
Recycled talking points
31 posts · 2 platforms
→
3 · Investigate
A long-form investigation with every claim traced to its source. 20 to 45 minutes.
14 scam networks across 383 accounts, in 45 minutes. The Philippines government and the Global Anti-Scam Alliance asked us to present.
Investigation run with Migrasia. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance has 124 members across 90 countries.
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64 interviews: we were selling to the wrong person

We were selling to
The analyst who signs up
Runs the first investigation, loves the product, holds no budget.
→
We sell to now
The director two rungs up
Holds the budget, and answers publicly when the harm lands.
Institute for Strategic Dialogue
They own the data. Sell the analytics.
Maryland · election commissioner
Committed to statewide deployment.
Bloomberg · data journalist
OSINT teams adopt faster than newsrooms.
M+C Saatchi · global agency
Brands pay for the same measurement.
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The paid tools are built for brands and governments

Arbiterinvestigations forpublic-interest work Social listeningMeltwater, Brandwatchbrands, from ~$25K a year PR & commsCision, Muck Rackbrands OSINT & investigationRecorded Future, Maltegodefense and government Narrative intelligenceBlackbird.AI, Cyabrabrand risk, now federal too General-purpose AIChatGPT, Perplexityone platform at a time Free public-interest toolsJunkipedia, Open Measurescollection, no investigation layer
The free tools stop at collection. The paid tools start near $25K a year and are built for brand risk. Nobody serves the institution in between.
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Two customers: one does the work, one pays for it

Impact
Fact-checkers and newsrooms
Free seats. They run the investigations and publish what we find.
←
pays for those seats
Paying
Marketing agencies, civil society, government
About $2,500 to $4,000 a month, and their director signs for it.
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Brands buy most of this market. We sell inside it.

Total market
$10B
Social listening and analytics today. Brands buy most of it.
We can serve
$160M
About 3,500 media companies, broadcasters and agencies, at a blended $45K a year.
Our beachhead
$3M
60 of them at ~$45K. We work with some already.
We grow two ways. Newsrooms lead us to civil society and government. Commercial partners lead us to marketing and PR.
Sources: Grand View Research (2024 basis); WAN-IFRA and the broadcasting unions; Vendr deal data. Detail in the appendix.
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Each customer opens the next one up

Public interest

Journalists, free seats
Networks distribute us: the IFCN's fact-checkers, and Indicator.media's 14,000 readers.
Media that pays
We measure their own mentions, so audience teams renew annually.
Civil society
Extremism researchers license data already. We sell the analytics layer on top.
Government
The setup we build for a civil-society organization becomes a state attorney general's.

Commercial, which funds the free seats

Pass the Salt
A consumer brand, and where we learned audience analytics.
Ychance, $60K signed
A prediction market. It prices public response into its odds.
M+C Saatchi
A global agency, and a channel into every brand it serves.
The two sides run on one platform. The public-interest side finds the problems and wins the grants; the commercial side pays for the free seats underneath it.
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Earned revenue reached $120K this year

$60K $120K $300K 2025, reached 2026, reached year 3, target
  • Subscriptions from larger newsrooms and civil-society clients.
  • Grants pay for the free access independent journalists get.
  • Users arrive from Dataminr and Meltwater asking to switch.
Contracts this year $178K signed across four contracts
Grants, separate INSEAD $110K Columbia · Brown Institute $100K
$120K counts earned revenue this year; multi-year contract values run higher. The 2027 plan is $300K earned alongside $700K in grants.
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What changed over the summer

Partnerships
We launched with Indicator.media, reaching its 14,000 readers. The IFCN asked for a rollout to its ~142 fact-checkers.
Governments
Maryland's commissioner has written his letter and committed to a statewide rollout. Odisha sent a contract. The NY Attorney General's office is in follow-up.
Money
Earned revenue reached $120K, with $178K signed across four contracts.
Field & press
Packard and Clinton teams started using Arbiter. Nieman Lab is interviewing us. 100+ organizations, 21 countries.
IFCN = International Fact-Checking Network. Grants are counted separately.
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The team

Swapneel Mehta
Research
Former MIT postdoc. Ex-X and Oxford. Mentor at JournalismAI.
Dhara Mungra
Engineering
Co-founder. NYU MS, ex-Bombora.
Chaitya Shah
Product
Columbia CS. Built ad tools for NYPR and WNYC.
Ethan Sheinker
Investigations
Columbia SIPA. Works on influence operations.
Diane Chang
Partnerships
Brown Institute. Ex-Meta, Cohere, NBC News.
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Three ways to help

Champion us
Run one investigation on a story you care about, then show it to the person who holds your budget.
Invite us
Into the rooms where this work belongs: a newsroom, a state agency, a foundation's docket.
Introduce us
To funders working on child safety, scams and synthetic content, and to the states that follow Maryland.

We make reliable information accessible to everyone. The institutions that answer to the public can now see who is behind the campaigns aimed at them.

We are a nonprofit. The 2027 plan needs $700K in philanthropy alongside $300K earned. arbiter.simppl.org · founders@simppl.org
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Market sourcing

$8B market
Social listening and analytics, Grand View Research 2023. MarketsandMarkets puts the floor at $4.8B.
~3,500 companies
WAN-IFRA member companies, broadcasting unions (EBU, ABU, ASBU) and national news agencies, summed.
~$45K ticket
Between Meltwater's SMB tail (~$16K) and its enterprise average (~$70K); Brandwatch's median sits at ~$50K. Vendr deal data.
$500M expansion
Adds the civic buyers next door, drawing on the OSINT (~$18B) and content-moderation (~$10B) markets.
Appendix

From June assumptions to July reality

Who pays
We assumed journalists would buy it. The institutions around them pay: states, agencies and funders.
The customer
We assumed one archetype, the investigative reporter. We found four segments sharing one need.
What they buy
We assumed a tool for one-off investigations. Buyers pay for measurement over time, and they renew on it.
The price
We assumed a flat subscription. Buyers wanted a build fee, a monthly tier and metered credits.
Appendix

Four more of the 64 interviews

Chequeado
Fact-checkers in Argentina. We run Meltwater and hand-enter every keyword and hashtag.
Seattle Times, Irish Times
Give us measurable metrics on our own mentions.
IFCN
Roll Arbiter out to all of our fact-checkers.
Funder
Our next money goes to synthetic content, child safety and scams.
Appendix