Legitimate platform aims to combat fake news

Husband and wife team Caoimhe and Gerard Donnelly are the founders of Legitimate, a content distribution and communications platform for journalists, politicians and content creators. The aim of the platform is to combat disinformation and fake news by providing users with a single location for all of their content and the public with a verified news and content source.

"Legitimate acts as a user's portfolio, pulling in their work from anywhere on the web and putting it together while at the same time offering the public confidence in the legitimacy of what they're reading," Caoimhe Donnelly says. "The platform instantly gives readers details about the authors of online content and provides them with the information they need in order to judge its reliability.

“With Legitimate they can follow the latest news and topics from their favourite journalists and content creators safe in the knowledge that there are no fake posts or bad actors and that everything they see is traceable,” she adds. “Journalists can use it as a professional network, politicians can use it to grow their support base and the PR community can use it to contact journalists and distribute information.”

The platform is free for verified users and it provides them with a suite of tools including content creation and messaging functions. Verification is outsourced to an international provider of identity verification services and Legitimate does not have access to any user’s verification data. Legitimate also aims to eliminate the distressing practices of trolling and online abuse by not allowing any public comment on its platform.

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UK news deal

Caoimhe Donnelly comes from a background in education and operations management while her husband is a full stack developer and marketing consultant with 20 years’ experience in the tech sector with both unicorns and Fortune 500 companies.

The couple set up Legitimate in January 2020 after more than a year researching the idea with journalism/communications schools and media professionals. The company’s website is up and running now in beta with full functionality for those who want to sign up early while the official launch will take place later this year. The company has recently signed a major deal with a UK news organisation which will immediately add 1,000 profiles and 200 publications to its data base.

“There isn’t anything like us out there and the current solution to disinformation is fact-checking which, while incredibly valuable, can also be very slow. We wanted to come up with an alternative solution,” Donnelly says.

Fundraising

"Legitimate is a blend of Medium, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google and we were prompted to set it up by seeing so much disinformation being spread across the internet and social media. Between the American elections and Covid, there was a lot of very misleading stuff out there and these fake stories were being seen by millions of people long before they could be fact-checked or verified."

Legitimate has been developed with sweat equity and a budget of roughly €75,000 which includes support from InvestNI. The company is in the throes of a fundraising round of $1.5 million which is expected to be closed out by the end of April. This will allow the Donnellys to build out their development and onboarding teams and to accelerate the commercial rollout of the platform.

Legitimate will make its money by charging PR companies to use the platform and it is also looking at developing a recruitment hub on the site which will provide a second revenue stream.

The company is based in Belfast and will initially focus on developing the Irish and UK markets before moving into the US. "Our aim is to be indexing millions of articles per day within the next 18 months and developing Legitimate into a credible content platform by creating the world's largest database of verified content," Donnelly says.