At 24, Nessa Kiani has founded Culldron, an app blending peer review, cryptocurrency micropayments, AI, and blockchain to deliver verified information amid the Ukraine war. The platform incentivizes users to share and check facts like air raid alerts, while generating multimedia content from reliable posts. Experts praise its innovation but raise concerns over verification speed and potential misuse by bad actors.
Nessa Kiani, a former research data scientist at the University of California, Irvine, shifted her focus in 2024 to develop tools against misinformation in conflict areas. Drawing from her work on medical debunking, she created Culldron, launched last month, to address the information challenges in Ukraine's war. The app's name combines 'culling' false data with a 'cauldron of ideas,' as Kiani described it as 'almost like an experiment.'
Culldron operates by paying users small cryptocurrency amounts—up to a tenth of a cent per interaction—for posting and verifying news, such as drone sightings or bombing updates. It employs a peer-review system akin to X's Community Notes, allowing refugees to post bounties for specific details about their areas. Verified information then fuels AI-produced videos, podcasts, and articles. Kiani aims to provide an income stream in economically unstable regions, funding the project with $500,000 from friends and family. She is the daughter of Joe Kiani, founder of Masimo, a prominent medical monitoring firm in Orange County, California.
The platform supports anonymous personas with a unified credibility score and avoids banning accounts except for extreme illicit content like pornography or violent crimes. Disproven posts remain visible to preserve voices, though repeated misinformation can lead to posting restrictions. Automated checks using metadata, geolocation, timestamps, and reverse image searches assign dynamic credibility ratings up to five dots, refined by peer input.
Yehven Fedchenko, editor in chief of Ukraine's StopFake fact-checking site, highlighted risks with time-sensitive fakes, noting, 'Some of the fakes are very time-sensitive, so you just cannot put it there for two months to verify. The harm is sometimes immediate.' Valeriia Stepaniuk of VoxCheck echoed worries about bad-faith actors mutually endorsing falsehoods, saying, 'People who are engaged in spreading fake information might come to this network because they want to spread their thoughts. There are big gaps in this approach.'
Stanford's emeritus professor Theodore Glasser, an adviser, called it 'exciting' and 'innovative,' adding, 'I think it deserves a chance to succeed.' With a few hundred accounts so far, Culldron scrapes Telegram channels vetted by Ukrainians for reliability. Kiani plans to compensate 'war influencers' for exclusive content and expand to regions like South Sudan, Iran, Venezuela, and the US, positioning it as a hub for overnight conflict updates.