New app overlays live fact-checks on YouTube videos, as trust in media hits record lows and nearly 4 in 10 young adults get news from influencers

Crickit, a new real-time fact‑checking app for social media videos, has launched its desktop YouTube extension in open beta, initially available to holders of Stanford email addresses. Others can request access via the waitlist at crickit.ai. Founded by serial Stanford StartX Entrepreneur Avi Tuschman, Crickit helps people make better decisions in a media ecosystem where trust is collapsing and misinformation is surging.

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Falsehoods race around the world before truth can get its boots on. With Crickit, facts can finally outrun misinformation, giving people the information they need to make smarter, healthier decisions.

A record-low 28% of Americans say they trust traditional news media such as newspapers, television, and radio. Meanwhile, a majority of Americans now get news from social media. On these platforms, 37% of 18–29-year-olds regularly follow influencers for news, even though influencers are widely cited as a top global source of misinformation. The consequences are stark: in 2018, a landmark MIT study found that false news on Twitter spreads 6× faster than the truth. By 2024, and again in 2025, the World Economic Forum ranked misinformation and disinformation as the single most severe global risk over the next two years. Taken together, these forces indicate a vicious cycle in which collapsing trust in traditional media pushes audiences toward untrustworthy new media sources, which further deepens confusion and vulnerability to personal and national-security risks.

“The core problem is structural, not moral. Social platforms are optimized to amplify high-arousal content, so the most outrageous and polarizing voices dominate,” said Tuschman, who is also an internationally recognized expert on the underpinnings of human political orientation.

Tuschman continued: “The result is more distrustful and factionalized societies. Since the mid-2000s, the explosive growth of social media has coincided with nearly 20 straight years of what political scientists describe as a global ‘Democratic Recession’—and documented harm to public and mental health. With Crickit, facts can finally outrun misinformation. We trust that people can make smarter, healthier decisions when they have bite-sized, open-source intelligence streaming through their media diet.”

A New Solution

Built for social-media video, Crickit overlays live fact-checks — like subtitles — so people can spot shaky claims in real time and see truth, context, and trusted sources without leaving the feed.

Crickit uses AI to detect important claims in YouTube videos and then checks them against high-reliability sources from live web searches. The app labels claims using five levels of factuality, provides concise explanations with additional context, and includes ground-truth links so audiences can inspect the sources for themselves.

Trust and Safety by Design

• Accuracy: In testing, Crickit’s search-grounded AI engine has achieved 98.7% accuracy on a product-track version of the AVeriTeC Supported/Refuted fact-checking benchmark. Based on this performance, Crickit estimates it can reduce exposure to viral misinformation by 32x in popular news videos.
• Third-Party Reliability Ratings: Crickit uses independent media-reliability ratings to filter out low-quality sources from ground-truth links (and will soon surface these scores in-app).
• Transparency: Each fact-check includes a concise explanation, added context, and three “Learn more” links to relevant print sources — so anyone can click through and verify the evidence.
• Data Privacy: Crickit does not store users’ viewing history linked to their accounts.

Crickit launches on November 19 for YouTube on desktop in open beta for holders of Stanford email addresses. Others can request access via the waitlist at crickit.ai. Crickit is not affiliated with or endorsed by Stanford University or YouTube.

About Crickit

Crickit is a non-partisan company that provides a patent-pending live fact-checking app that overlays evidence-backed context directly on social media videos. The company’s mission is to help people make smarter, healthier decisions by turning noisy feeds into clear signals drawn from open-source intelligence. Crickit is focused on YouTube, with plans to expand to additional platforms. For more information, visit crickit.ai.

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"With Crickit, facts can finally outrun misinformation. We trust that people can make smarter, healthier decisions when they have bite-sized, open-source intelligence streaming through their media diet.” - Crickit Founder Avi Tuschman