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In 2024, Nessa Kiani was a research data scientist at the University of California, Irvine, spending her free time building an online tool that would debunk medical misinformation. Then she realized the tool could be used to verify and share information of all sorts—and she decided to turn her focus toward conflict zones, starting with the war in Ukraine. Now, at twenty-four, she is the founder of an app called Culldron—a mix of peer-reviewed posts, crypto micropayments, AI-generated content, and blockchain technology whose aim is to provide accurate information to people living through war. The name refers both to the “culling” of information and to the platform’s cauldron of ideas. “It’s almost like an experiment,” Kiani said.
Culldron, which launched last month, pays people small amounts of crypto, worth up to a tenth of a cent per interaction, to share and verify news about Ukraine, such as air raid alerts and drone sightings. The app validates this crowdsourced information using a peer-review system—sort of like X’s Community Notes for a war zone. People seeking specific information—maybe refugees wondering about the fate of their neighborhood after a bombing—can also offer a “bounty” of any amount to solicit that information. Culldron then makes and shares AI-generated videos, podcasts, and articles based on verified posts.
The model is intended to “give an income stream to people who are in areas that have destabilized economies,” Kiani said. She was able to get the project off the ground with the help of two engineers and five hundred thousand dollars she raised from friends and family. (She is the daughter of Joe Kiani, the founder of the Masimo medical monitoring company and one of Orange County, California’s wealthiest individuals as of last year.)
Of course, relying on workers compensated in tiny amounts could pose challenges. Yehven Fedchenko, the editor in chief of StopFake, a popular fact-checking site in Ukraine, expressed concern about how long a post might sit on the platform before being verified, given the scant incentives to work quickly. “Some of the fakes are very time-sensitive, so you just cannot put it there for two months to verify,” he said. “The harm is sometimes immediate.”
Culldron allows multiple, anonymous “personas” for posters and verifiers, although a singular “credibility score” follows them across personas. Kiani said Culldron won’t delete or ban accounts on the platform, even if they are posting inaccurate information, except in extreme cases. “We don’t really ban any content on Culldron, except for illicit content, like pornography or child sexual exploitation, violent crimes and things like that,” she said. “It’s not harmful to the platform, and we definitely still want to make sure that everyone gets their voice, even people who maybe aren’t putting the best information out there.” Information on Culldron remains visible even after it has been disproven, though Culldron may ban people from posting if they are repeatedly posting misinformation.
As soon as posts go up on the app, Culldron uses automated software to monitor them for accuracy based on factors including metadata, geolocation, time stamps, and reverse image searches; posts receive a credibility rating of up to five dots. This rating is dynamic and changes based on peer reviews and additional information. Valeriia Stepaniuk, the acting head of VoxCheck in Ukraine, worries that bad-faith actors will try to use the platform to post and endorse one another’s claims, verifying them as accurate when they aren’t. “People who are engaged in spreading fake information might come to this network because they want to spread their thoughts,” she said. “There are big gaps in this approach.”
Theodore Glasser, an emeritus professor of communication at Stanford, served as an adviser on the project. “It’s exciting,” he said. “It’s innovative. I think it deserves a chance to succeed. I don’t know whether it will succeed.” (He hasn’t spent much time using it yet.)
While Culldron builds its user base of people who might post information—there are a few hundred accounts on the platform now—the staff has been scraping and sharing posts from Telegram. Telegram, however, is a notorious source of misinformation—precisely the problem Kiani has set out to confront. To work around that, Kiani said, she has been consulting with Ukrainians to ask them which channels are most trustworthy. “We are on the people’s side. We’re on the journalists’ side. We’re just trying to give people ownership and save information so that the narratives don’t get lost later on,” she told me.
Eventually, Kiani hopes to pay people she referred to as “war influencers” in Ukraine with large audiences to produce content exclusively for Culldron, at least for a few months, to gain traction for the platform. If things go well, Kiani wants to expand the platform to South Sudan, Iran, Venezuela, and the US. “I guess we would want to cover conflict zones in general, and be the platform where things happen overnight,” she said.
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