When he says, “We’ve lost touch with the sense of the whole,” it’s not a lament—it’s a warning. The disease of misinformation isn’t just poisoning our political discourse or undermining innovation; it’s chipping away at the glue that binds societies together.

News as Theory, Not Fact

Most things in the news, says Rafael, aren’t facts. “They’re theories.” And that matters. We don’t need everyone to agree, he explains:

“Consensus is not good for progress.”

But we do need everyone to follow the same logic. That’s what Beehive provides: a transparent, objective framework to assess news articles based on consistency, context, and credibility—not ideology.

His pandemic example is revealing. When UK media declared Brazil’s Covid response a catastrophe, the headlines were technically true. But the omission of critical context—Brazil’s much larger population, regional disparities, and urban/rural divides—meant the narrative was misleading. It’s not fake news. It’s just incomplete. And that, Cossi warns, is the most dangerous kind.

The Slow Collapse of Trust

“Information is soft power,” Rafael reminds us. It shapes not just opinions but entire economies, voting behaviours, and social contracts. Today, he observes:

“A lot of young people in the UK don’t believe in democracy anymore.”

It’s not hard to see why. When truth becomes a battleground, the casualties are cohesion and common purpose.

Misinformation doesn’t need to be believed to be effective. It just needs to be seen. Cossi explains how emotional anchoring—what psychologists call “knowledge neglect”—can distort perception even when we know something is untrue. The damage is already done.

A Better Incentive: Pay for Quality

What Beehive is trying to do is simple, yet radical: create a marketplace where quality journalism is not just a moral imperative but a commercial advantage.

“When people use our app to read news,” says Cossi, “they’re 35% more likely to click on well-rated articles.”

That data doesn’t just help readers—it gives publishers a reason to care.

And some do. Beehive collaborates with media regulators and has already started nudging some major outlets towards better standards. But others? “They say, ‘You’ve correctly identified the flaws—but we only care about engagement.’”

This isn’t cynicism—it’s systems failure.

Beyond the Printing Press

To make sense of today’s chaotic information ecosystem, Cossi turns to history. The invention of the printing press, he notes, was followed by centuries of chaos, propaganda, and ultimately, regulation. The same must now happen with digital content.

“We review hotels, we review restaurants—why not the news?” he asks.

But his vision is not authoritarian. Beehive doesn’t decide what’s true or false. It simply makes transparent what’s missing. In doing so, it reintroduces a sense of shared informational ground—without flattening the complexity of diverse perspectives.

A Magic Wand for Holism

When asked what he’d change about the commercial world, Cossi doesn’t mention regulation or AI. He wants to restore a “sense of the whole”—a worldview that connects individual decisions to collective impact. The metaphor he uses comes from the Apple TV series Severance, where workers forget their real lives the moment they enter the office.

“We’ve siloed ourselves,” he says. “We’ve lost our sense of purpose.”

This is the moral heart of the conversation. Not just how we rate news. But how we relate to one another.