Yesterday, the coworking space Area Tres was transformed into a journalistic innovation lab. For more than 8 intense hours, developers, journalists, designers, and activists worked side-by-side at the Media Party’s Truth Tech Hackathon, the culminating event of three days dedicated to building the future of reliable information.
Yesterday, the coworking space Area Tres was transformed into a journalistic innovation lab. For more than 8 intense hours, developers, journalists, designers, and activists worked side-by-side at the Media Party’s Truth Tech Hackathon, the culminating event of three days dedicated to building the future of reliable information.
The day was the outcome of the XIII edition of Media Party, which brought together more than 2,000 people from 30 countries at the Ciudad Cultural Konex. But it was at this hackathon where ideas materialized into concrete prototypes and where the urgent need to combat disinformation found tangible technological answers.
The Context: Truth Tech as the New Frontier
The Truth Tech Initiative is based on a disturbing premise, held by its organizers: “truth will be as scarce as drinking water in the future.” Faced with this outlook, the initiative proposes an interdisciplinary approach that integrates artificial intelligence, ethics, behavioral sciences, and cybersecurity to strengthen information ecosystems.
The strategic alliance with LAIA (Open Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence) was fundamental. Its focus on democratizing AI and promoting technological sovereignty provided participants with tools like Lovable — which allows creating applications using natural language — and TwelveLabs — for semantic analysis of audiovisual content. These platforms eliminated technical barriers, allowing innovation to emerge beyond code: it was not necessary to be a programmer to create.
The Projects: A Diversity of Approaches, a Common Purpose
The ten competing projects represented a range of strategies to address the crisis of informational credibility:
- OSINT for Journalists and Activists: Promoted by La Izquierda Diario, it brought open-source investigation to teams without technical knowledge. Its pilot case on José Luis Espert demonstrated how to map relationships and key data in an accessible and automatable way.
- NewsChain: Applied blockchain to journalistic traceability. Pablo Gómez’s proposal would allow readers to scan QR codes to verify the complete journey of an article, from its conception to its publication, using smart contracts.
- Polyglot Truth: Tackled language barriers. It improved transcription tools between Arabic, Spanish, and English so that journalists can directly access voices from conflicts without intermediaries filtering the information.
- Argumentative Map of Speeches: Transcribed and analyzed speeches in real-time to identify logical fallacies and persuasive figures, exposing argumentative manipulations through interactive visualizations.
- Trust: Quality Metrics: Presented a robust open-source system that generates automated indicators of journalistic quality, evaluating factual accuracy, diversity of sources, and informational balance.
- ANPILAC: Created the first regional platform dedicated to early childhood in Latin America and the Caribbean, with tools to highlight challenges and strengthen investment in child development.
- Check Media: Developed artificial intelligence to improve readers’ critical analysis, under the premise that more critical audiences generate higher quality journalism.
- Real Pix: In collaboration with Chequeado, it created certificates of origin for images, determining whether they were captured in real life or generated by AI — crucial in the era of visual manipulation. This project received a special mention from the jury.
- New2Trust: A project by Data Science students from the UBA, it designed a browser extension that identifies claims in articles, verifies their truthfulness with reliable sources using AI, and fosters debate communities.
- Chatbot for Migrant Community Leaders: A proposal by Refugio Latinoamericano, it democratized journalistic production by developing a WhatsApp assistant that allows migrant leaders to produce articles based on the 7 Ws of journalism, with editorial review included.
- RumorIAdo: Worked intensively during the day as a bot specialized in separating facts from rumors in Argentine political news, analyzing official and unofficial sources to offer transparent answers on informational credibility.
The Winner: Diggity
After eight hours of uninterrupted work, the jury — composed of Jessica Gómes (Meedan), Craig Hammer (World Bank), Sasa Vucinic (North Base Media), and Paula Isaak (Fundar) — selected Diggity as the winning project. This fully configurable tool evaluates journalistic quality through customizable metrics and won a stimulus prize of USD 1000 from the World Bank to continue its development. Its focus on self-assessment and continuous improvement highlighted it as a structural solution to strengthen journalism from within.
Beyond the Competition
The Truth Tech Hackathon achieved something more valuable than awarding projects: it generated a collaborative ecosystem where the shared urgency to protect the truth catalyzed unexpected alliances. Data from the World Bank, Internet Society Pulse, AVINA, and FUNDAR fed prototypes with verified, first-hand information.
The “journalism with superpowers” that Media Party promotes is not rhetoric: it is the concrete result of combining journalistic knowledge, technical capacity, and ethical commitment. Ultimately, the Truth Tech Initiative sets a key precedent: the battle against disinformation is not fought only with reactive fact-checking, but by building proactive systems that make verification and transparency structural components of the information ecosystem.
