Power Broker
Areto Labs – Lana Cuthbertson, CEO, and Kasey Machin, COO
As Lana Cuthbertson and Kasey Machin worked to encourage women to run for elected office, they noticed a disturbing trend: Worries of vile online abuse were rising rapidly.
“Every time we had coffee with some-one who was thinking about running, that excuse for not doing it was further up the list until it was the number one reason,” Cuthbertson says. “They’d ask, ‘What would it do to their Twitter feed? How would they and their staff cope with it? There are no solutions, so how do we manage this?’”
Machin and Cuthbertson, who both worked with Equal Voice and were a part of the ParityYEG start-up, decided to work on a solution.
Cuthbertson, a Top 40 Under 40 in 2018, invented ParityBOT, a Twitter bot that uses artificial intelligence to detect and rate the toxicity of tweets aimed at women in public office or leadership. The bot scores tweets in terms of their toxicity. It does not respond to each negative tweet, but instead sends out encouraging words to the candidate’s account, so the feed isn’t entirely toxic.
It has sent out more than 12,000 tweets so far. An example: During the recent American election, it automatically sent out the tweet, “To #womeninpolitics: You’re stronger than anyone who criticizes you” to candidates subjected to abusive language online.
The pair later founded Areto Labs. Cuthbertson is the CEO, Machin, the COO.
Earlier in her career, Machin had a front-row seat to online abuse directed at elected officials. She worked as a policy and communications adviser to Edmonton City Councillor Andrew Knack, who has an active social media presence.
“I had a wonderful time there, but when you’re an elected official, you are subject to really terrible language and some people say some really offensive things. That got draining,” says Machin.
Things came to a head when Knack received a death threat online. For the first time, Machin was worried about safety.