After helping lead the lawsuit that bankrupted media firm Gawker, Aron D’Souza says he saw something broken in the American media system: People who felt harmed by coverage had little recourse to fight back.

His solution is software. D’Souza says his latest startup, Objection, aims to use AI to adjudicate the truth of journalism. And for the price of $2,000, anyone can pay to challenge a story, triggering a public investigation into its claims. (D’Souza is also the founder of the Enhanced Games, an Olympics-style competition that allows performance-enhancing drugs and is set to debut in Las Vegas next month.)

Objection launched on Wednesday with “multiple millions” in seed funding from Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, as well as VC firms Social Impact Capital and Off Piste Capital.

Thiel, who funded the Gawker lawsuit partly in defense of the individual right to privacy, has long been critical of the media. D’Souza says his goal is to restore trust in the Fourth Estate, which he argues has collapsed over decades. Critics, including media lawyers, warn Objection could make it harder to publish the kind of reporting that holds powerful institutions to account, particularly if that reporting relies on confidential sources.

Anonymous sources have played a key role in major award-winning investigations into corruption and corporate wrongdoing. These are often people who are at risk of losing their jobs or facing other retaliation for sharing important information. It’s the journalist’s job — alongside their publication’s editors, peers, and lawyers — to ensure that those sources are reliable and not acting out of pure malice and to verify the information they provide.

Image Credits:Objection AI

But that’s not enough for D’Souza, who said “using a fully anonymized source who hasn’t been independently verified” would lead to a lower evidence and trust score on Objection. Under the platform’s rubric, primary records like regulatory filings and official emails carry the most weight, while anonymous whistleblower claims are ranked near the bottom. Those inputs are collected in part by a team of freelancers — former law enforcement agents and investigative journalists — and are ultimately fed into what Objection calls an “Honor Index,” a numerical score the company says reflects a reporter’s integrity, accuracy, and track record.

“Protecting a source’s information is a vital way of telling an important story, but there’s an important power asymmetry there,” D’Souza told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “The subject gets reported upon, but then there’s no way to critique the source.”

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His solution presents a lose-lose for journalists: either divulge sensitive source information to Objection’s “cryptographic hash” that determines “if it’s high quality reporting,” or face demerits for protecting sources who share important information at great personal risk. If technology like Objection takes off, it could chill whistleblowing, experts argue.

Jane Kirtley, a lawyer and professor of media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, says Objection fits into a long pattern of attacks that erode public trust in the press.

“If the underlying theme is, ‘Here’s yet another example of how the news media are lying to you,’ that’s one more chink in the armor to help destroy public confidence in independent journalism,” she said, adding that clearly journalists need to do their part to be as transparent as possible in their reporting.

Kirtley pointed to existing journalistic standards, like the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, which advises reporters to use anonymous sources only when there is no other way to obtain the information. She also cited longstanding industry practices like peer criticism and internal editorial review as built-in accountability methods. More broadly, she questioned whether Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are not steeped in journalistic traditions are equipped to evaluate what serves the public interest.

D’Souza says Objection is not an attempt to silence whistleblowers: “It’s an attempt to fact-check; it’s the same as [X’s] Community Notes. The wisdom of the crowd plus the power of

Can AI judge journalism? A Thiel-backed startup says yes, even if it risks chilling whistleblowers