Julia is building a patent-pending way to spot deepfakes and bots without turning the internet into a surveillance state. Instead of playing an endless game of “detect the AI” (which gets harder every month), Julia’s approach is to verify the human behind the content—so when a video, photo, post, or message shows up, people can check whether a real person actually stood behind it and approved it.

At the center of the system is not.bot, a privacy-first identity and signing layer designed for everyday use. With not.bot, people create “stickers” that function like a digital signature you can attach to social posts, dating profiles, emails/DMs, and media like photos and videos. Anyone can scan the sticker to see what was signed and whether it matches the content they’re looking at—making impersonation, reposting, and synthetic manipulation far easier to catch in the real world. The key is specificity: the more clearly a sticker describes what it’s attached to, the harder it is for bad actors to reuse it elsewhere without being exposed.

Julia’s value is also how verification happens. Getting started on not.bot involves scanning a US passport on iPhone, but critically: passport information is stored only on the user’s device. Julia Social (the company behind not.bot) emphasizes that it does not possess users’ passport data, can’t lose it, and can’t leak what it never collected—an intentional design choice that reduces breach risk and aligns incentives toward user safety.

To protect privacy in day-to-day life, Julia supports multiple aliases, so you can maintain separate identities for different contexts (work, personal, public posting, etc.) without those identities being easily linked. Users also get visual identity cues like a LifeHash—a recognizable “visual fingerprint”—and can use higher-capacity JAB codes (similar to supersized QR codes) to embed verification directly into the sticker itself.

Julia’s mission is rooted in a simple idea: in a world flooded with synthetic media, trust can’t rely solely on brittle detection models or centralized databases of personal information. It needs a human-first verification primitive that scales, respects privacy, and works across platforms. Even the name “Julia Social” nods to George Orwell’s 1984—a symbol of protecting agency through privacy.