ActiveFence acquires Rewire to help customers identify harmful text-based content

ActiveFence has completed the acquisition of Rewire, a London-based startup that’s building AI for online safety.

Combining ActiveFence’s Trust and Safety platform, content detection AI models and scalable API with Rewire’s repertoire of innovative text models will arm customers in the fight against malicious behavior, allowing them to reliably find and take action against dangers at scale in real time.

AI is a game-changer when battling harmful content online. Rewire has developed a catalog of AI models for detecting different types of harmful text-based content, including insults, hate speech, profanity, violence, sexually explicit language and suicide and self-harm content.

Rewire will support and help strengthen ActiveFence’s existing AI text models to better defend customers against harmful content.

“AI is the key to powering our fight against online threat actors, but your defense is only as good as your AI models,” said ActiveFence CEO Noam Schwartz.

“Joining forces with Rewire will allow us to build even more accurate and trustworthy models more efficiently, bringing together Rewire’s high-quality datasets with ActiveFence’s assets and infrastructure to create a significant step forward in AI for online safety at scale,” Schwartz continued.

Rewire’s performance results from their proprietary development process, which trains better models using less data and can be adapted for a range of different tasks. Rewire is able to use relatively small amounts of labeled data because it deploys adversarial data generation.

This works iteratively, generating data that challenges models, which then uses that data to retrain and strengthen models where they are weak. Through this process, Rewire has helped detect sexist content, flagged harmful customer feedback and helped a German nonprofit monitor anti-Semitic messages on German Telegram channels.

“Rewire’s founding mission is to change how platforms moderate online content, and build an open and accessible internet where people are safe from harm,” said Bertie Vidgen, CEO of Rewire who co-founded the company with CTO Paul Röttger in 2021.

“Joining ActiveFence will help us extend this vision to the more than 3 billion users that ActiveFence protects, using our AI models to detect even the most evasive harmful content,” Vidgen concluded.

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