Short-Form Video App, SaySo, To Rebuild Trust

To stay current on news, a lot of consumers are lured to social media sites like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok to get updates on what is happening in and around them.

However, complaints about false information and AI garbage clogging their feeds are growing. Concerns around the ownership of American TikTok and lawsuits against Meta for allegedly harming youth have further increased worries about trust. (Trust in traditional news sources has also declined; according to an October Pew Research study, only 56% of American people think they have a lot or some trust in national news media.)

Let’s introduce SaySo, a brand-new short-form video app that offers carefully chosen news from independent journalists and creators. 

Following a private beta that started in November, it was made available to iOS users in the United States and Canada this month.

By providing a more deliberate and customized news experience that eliminates tedious scrolling, the app hopes to differentiate itself from competing platforms.

SaySo’s Daily Digest is one of its best features. The app curates a collection of videos for users every day once they create a profile and select areas of interest, such as politics, social issues, public health, or crime. Every twenty hours, this selection is updated.

Users can find more content from various creators on the Explore tab to delve deeper into a wider variety of subjects. SaySo also has standard functions like following, liking, saving, commenting, and sharing.

In order to gain users’ trust, SaySo notably mandates that producers incorporate information sources directly into their films. To guarantee content integrity, the app also integrates source validation with AI and human moderation.

Co-founder and CTO Dion Bailey told the members of the press who were present that “content doesn’t auto-publish.” Since everything passes through a moderation queue, the majority of issues are resolved before they are seen by readers. If something slips through and is reported, we look into it, speak with the developer personally, and remove it if it goes too far. 

SaySo is also working on a “community notes” feature that will let people take part in the accountability process by using a crowdsourced fact-checking method akin to TikTok and X.

Information about the company is that SaySo hired about thirty creators when the company first launched. Nico Agosta is one of them; he first became well-known for his “Stocking the Capitol” video series, in which he delves into the financial transactions of members of the US Congress. Additionally, there is Isabel Ravenna, an independent journalist with bylines in publications like National Geographic, and Dr. Victoria, who specializes in issues pertaining to social reform and racial justice.

With respect to creator compensation, SaySo CEO and co-founder Ramin Beheshti states that “many [creators] have come on as founding partners and are receiving a stipend from day one.” We’ll be developing the entire monetization infrastructure over the next several months, and the great majority of the money that comes in goes straight to the creators. He refused to elaborate on the revenue split or the details of the monetization system.

Eheshti was previously Dow Jones’ who is the Chief Product & Technology Officer.

Caliber, formerly known as The News Movement, was formed in 2022 and relaunched in 2025 to emphasize social, short-form news. SaySo is the company’s primary app.

Beheshti further adds that instead of adding to the familiar overwhelm that so many of us experience, we wanted to build a new breed of news product that helped people. He went further to think that they had unlocked something very special when we combine that with what building Caliber has taught us about creators and the evolving nature of modern media.

In the future, the company intends to introduce SaySo in the United Kingdom in the summer and expand into other markets during this year and 2027. 

The app is currently available on iOS in the United States and Canada, with expansion to the United Kingdom planned by summer 2026.