Aaron D’Souza says he saw something broken in America’s media system after he helped lead the lawsuit that bankrupted media company Gawker. Those who felt hurt by the coverage had little recourse to fight back.
His solution is software. D’Souza says his latest startup, Objection, aims to use AI to determine truth in journalism. And for $2,000, anyone can dispute an article, triggering a public investigation into the claim. (Sousa is also the founder of the Enhanced Games, an Olympic-style competition that allows the use of performance-enhancing drugs, and is scheduled to be held for the first time in Las Vegas next month.)
Objection launched on Wednesday with “multimillions of dollars” in seed funding from Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, and venture capital firms Social Impact Capital and Off Piste Capital.
Thiel, who funded the Gawker lawsuit in part to defend personal privacy rights, has long been a critic of the media. D’Souza says his goal is to restore trust in the Fourth Estate, which has been eroded for decades. Critics, including media lawyers, have warned that the challenges could make it difficult to publish reports that hold powerful institutions accountable, especially when those reports rely on confidential sources.
Anonymous sources have played key roles in major award-winning investigations into corruption and corporate wrongdoing. These are often people who are at risk of losing their jobs or facing other retaliation for sharing sensitive information. It is the job of journalists, as well as publication editors, colleagues, and lawyers, to verify the information they provide, ensuring that their sources are reliable and not acting out of pure malice.
But that’s not enough for D’Souza, who said that “using completely anonymized sources that have not been independently verified” leads to lower evidence and credibility scores for challenges. The platform’s rubric ranks primary records such as regulatory filings and official emails as most important, with anonymous whistleblower claims ranked near the bottom. This information is collected, in part, by a team of freelancers, including former law enforcement officers and investigative journalists, and is ultimately fed into what Objection calls its “honor index.” The metric is a numerical score that the company claims reflects a reporter’s honesty, accuracy and performance.
“Protecting source information is an essential way to tell important stories, but there are important power asymmetries,” D’Souza told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “The story gets reported, but there’s no way to criticize the source.”
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His solution is a loss for journalists. Either expose sensitive sources to Objection’s cryptographic hashes that determine quality reporting, or face the disadvantages of protecting sources who share sensitive information at great personal risk. Experts say the proliferation of technologies like Objection could curtail whistleblowing.
Jane Kirtley, a lawyer and professor of media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, said the objections fit into a long pattern of attacks that undermine public trust in the press.
“If the underlying theme is ‘this is another example of how news organizations lie,’ then that’s another chip in the armor that helps destroy public trust in independent journalism,” she said, adding that clearly journalists need to do their part to be as transparent as possible in their reporting.
Kirtley pointed to existing journalistic standards, such as the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, which advises reporters to use anonymous sources only when there is no other way to obtain information. She also cited long-standing industry practices such as peer criticism and internal editorial reviews as built-in accountability methods. More broadly, she questioned whether Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, not steeped in journalistic tradition, had the ability to evaluate what served the public interest.
D’Souza said the challenge is not an attempt to silence whistleblowers. “It’s an attempt at fact-checking, not unlike[X’s]community notes. It combines the wisdom of the crowd with the power of technology to create new ways to tell the truth.”
Asked whether the challenge would make it harder for the media to publish important stories for which they are held accountable, he said: “If it increases standards of transparency and trust, then that’s a good thing.”
He calls Objection an “untrustworthy system” with a transparent methodology that relies on a jury of large-scale language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, and Google, who are encouraged to act as average readers and evaluate the evidence claim by claim. Kyle Grant Talbot, the company’s chief engineer and former NASA and SpaceX engineer, is leading the technology development of the platform, which D’Souza said is designed to apply scientific rigor to factual disputes.
The proposal comes as AI systems themselves face increased scrutiny over bias, hallucinations, and transparency, all of which could complicate their use as arbiters of truth.
While appeals can apply to any public content, including podcasts and social media, D’Souza’s focus remains primarily on traditional and written media.
“Each objection is limited to a single factual allegation,” D’Souza said in a follow-up email. “This means that even if the report is long and complex, challenges will be limited to narrow factual issues within it. Users can choose to file multiple challenges to different parts of the same article, but these will all be processed independently of each other.”
A challenge costs $2,000, a large sum for most Americans, but a relatively small amount for wealthy individuals and corporations who might otherwise go to court. D’Souza said he hopes the platform will help those who feel misrepresented in the media. But critics point out that those best able to use dissent are likely to be powerful actors who already have other means of resistance.
“The fact that this is a kind of pay-to-play system tells us that they’re less interested in providing useful information to the general public and much more interested in giving those already in power the means to essentially intimidate their journalistic adversaries,” Kirtley said.
First Amendment and defamation attorney Chris Mattei was even more blunt, saying the platform “looks like a high-tech protection fee for the rich and powerful.”
“At a time when so many people are trying to hide the truth, we should encourage whistleblowers with knowledge of wrongdoing,” said Mattei, a leading litigation expert. “This company’s purpose seems to be the opposite.”
The system also evaluates only the evidence submitted, such as party submissions and materials collected by investigators, raising questions about how to deal with incomplete or unpublished information that is common in investigative reporting.
Asked how to prevent abuses, such as companies targeting unfavorable reporting or the system itself lacking sensitive evidence, D’Souza said journalists can submit their own evidence to protect their reputations. This could effectively force reporters to participate in a system they did not opt into, further putting their credibility at risk. Otherwise, the system could return “indeterminate” results, casting doubt on reports that are accurate but difficult to publicly verify.
Even if Objection doesn’t find anything wrong with the story, a companion feature called “Fire Blanket” may raise questions about its authenticity. The tool is currently active on X via the platform API and flags disputed claims in real-time by posting warnings. That is, inserting its own “under investigation” label into the public conversation even though the allegations are still under review.
Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar at UCLA, said the platform itself is unlikely to violate free speech protections, but instead positions itself as part of a broader ecosystem of criticism surrounding journalism. He compared the concept to opposition research that targeted reporters rather than politicians, and rejected the idea that it would have a chilling effect on whistleblowers.
“Any criticism creates a chilling effect,” he told TechCrunch.
Whether someone embraces it or simply ignores it may determine whether Objections reshapes journalism or disappears into a growing ecosystem of tools that seek to do so.
Or, as Kirtley said, “Why do you believe that AI will necessarily provide more reliable information about the truth or falsity of facts than the journalists who researched and wrote the stories? I mean, why would you simply assume that? I don’t think so at all.”
Editor’s note: Because D’Souza’s proposal is focused on transparency and accountability, we have published a link to the full transcript, lightly edited for length and clarity.
