I first met Vitaly in the spring of last year.
He spoke little English,
but he was very charming.
On his left arm he had a tattoo of the singer Marilyn Manson.
On his right leg, he had a tattoo of Winnie-the-Pooh.
(Laughter)
It was a rather strange experience.
I was there to hear his story,
and it was a story that I would never have believed,
had I not myself spent eight months in the year of 2014
in Ukraine covering the war between Moscow and Kiev.
Now, at around the same time, in August 2014,
Vitaly found himself in St. Petersburg without a job.
Vitaly was a journalist.
But the website he worked for had lost its funding.
So he sent out endless applications.
Heard nothing.
Eventually something came back.
He'd sent out so many,
he couldn't even remember which job it had been for.
He went for an interview, he duly got the job.
It was at - sorry -
OK - Let me just - Yeah -
It was at a nondescript building in the centre of St. Petersburg,
55 Savushkina Street.
And when Vitaly started,
he realized it wasn't quite your every day media company.
He was assigned to a project called "Ukraine 2".
His job was to essentially write articles about Ukraine -
which was fair enough,
I mean, it's a subject of interest for Russians -
with some slight differences.
His job was to write articles
from websites ending in ".ua".
That is to say, websites that pretended to be Ukrainian.
So he would take for example a newspaper called the Donetsk News,
an Eastern city in Ukraine occupied by pro-Russian separatists.
And he would write articles about it.
It wasn't too bad.
He would stick to the basic facts.
But he wasn't allowed to use the word terrorist or separatist.
He had to call them militia.
The Ukrainian army, on the other hand,
had to always be referred to as volunteer battalions
or national guards.
These are battalions that still exist today,
that have well-deserved reputations
for containing far-right or thuggish elements.
Now, as time passed,
it became clear to Vitaly
that he was working in what later would become known to the media
as a "troll factory" or a "troll farm".
And the farm had a very clear structure.
On the first floor was Vitaly writing fake news websites,
and his colleagues.
The second floor was a social media department.
Here cartoons and memes were created
to spread across all forms of platforms, social media platforms,
promulgating the Kremlin line on Ukraine.
On the third floor were the bloggers.
Now, there were two types of bloggers.
The first were the "Ukrainian" bloggers
who would blog about how terrible the situation in Kiev was,
how parts of the city didn't have electricity,
how the kindergartens were running low on food.
The second were the "American" bloggers.
They would write about how the whole of America supported Putin's actions,
that Ukrainians were fascists,
all sorts of things like this.
Hilariously, or perhaps bitterly hilariously, what would happen is
the bloggers on the third floor,
their output would become sources
for the fake news articles on the first floor.
So, it was a merry-go-round of lies.
Now, on the fourth floor were the big time, big time trolls.
These were the guys and women
tasked with commenting on Facebook, Twitter,
and most of all, VKontakte,
which is the Russian version of Facebook,
a very, very popular social media platform
for the Kremlin and the Russian government.
Now, after a month of working on the fake websites,
Vitaly was sent to the social media section.
And his work began to take a different turn.
So, what he would have -
When Vitaly was sent to this section,
he was first given a load of different SIM cards.
To register on VKontakte, you have to have a phone number.
And the troll farm had an inexhaustible supply.
And his job was just to spam
every, but every, page you could think of with this -
I mean often group pages that have nothing to do with politics.
One example, he spammed the site
devoted to couples meeting up for sex in a small Russian town.
There was no logic to it.
He always had to use female profiles,
as females were seen to be more trusted than male profiles.
The second thing he had to do,
and this is central to the dissemination of information in the social media age,
is it had to be visual.
This is something I have learned
from the State Department to the Israeli Defence Forces,
that if you want information,
if you want people to look at what you have to say,
it has to be visual.
And, in fact,
people, even when they look at your link, they probably won't click on it.
So what you do, is you leave your message in the meme, in the visuals.
So here we have a tearful looking picture of Obama.
He's saying, "I want to start a war, but none of my friends will join me."
Here we have a two-panel picture of Obama.
On the first, he is looking very serious, saying: "We don't talk to terrorists."
The second panel, he is shown smiling:
"We only sponsor them!"
The goal was to attack
people seen as hostile to the Kremlin's war in Ukraine.
That was Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and leading Ukrainian politicians.
Now, after a while, this got to Vitaly.
He felt dirty,
he didn't like the work he was doing,
he was having problems with his nerves.
So, in the end, he decided to quit.
His boss, Anna, asked him why, and he told her the truth.
He said, "I don't believe in what we're doing."
So, he left.
But still he couldn't get the experience out of his mind.
He felt like he had to make amends.
So, he decided to write an article about his experiences.
He wrote it anonymously,
and he presented it as if he were female.
Because the majority of the trolls farms' [employees] were [females].
It came out, and it did well.
It got a lot traction.
Even [Alexei] Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, tweeted it.
Unfortunately, Vitaly's attempts at anonymity had been less successful.
An hour after it came out,
he got a text from his boss Anna -
or ex-boss -
telling him that he thought he was a hero
but he was, in fact, a little son-of-a-bitch,
who couldn't do anything for himself but could only spoil the work of others.
Then the phone calls started.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?"
a gruff male voice called him up one night,
"Don't you know people can get punched in the face for this sort of thing?"
For a while, Vitaly was afraid to walk the streets alone.
Now ...
if you are tempted -
Sorry, that's just Putin.
I never get over that picture, it kills me every time.
If you are tempted to dismiss Vitaly's story
as just a bunch of internet nerds playing around ... don't,
because it is effective.
I saw it for myself on the ground,
in Eastern Ukraine as I travelled through the cities, the occupied cities,
that spring and summer of 2014,
as they fell almost daily to pro-Russia separatists.
Now, Marshal McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher said:
"All media are extensions of some human faculty, psychic or physical."
Travelling through Eastern Ukraine in 2014,
it was as if Putin's central nervous system were on display.
The content that had come from Vitaly's pen, directly,
was all around me.
The online world had seeped into the offline reality.
On the ground in Eastern Ukraine,
old men parroted geopolitical concepts,
like Novorossiya,
a Czarist term referring to part of Eastern Ukraine as belonging to Russia,
that they barely understood.
Teenagers, laughingly, showed me
racist memes of Barack Obama on their smartphone,
knocked up in the troll factory.
The belief that Kiev was a fascist junta,
and that it genuinely wanted to destroy the speaking of Russian in the East,
was sincerely held.
This was not, I realized, mere propaganda,
it wasn't narratives;
it was the reinvention of reality.
Now, we have to ask: How did we get here?
Putin's information age could only be possible in a post-truth age.
And what has created this age is social media.
Now, social media brings people together, we know this.
It's transnational.
You can speak to your friend in India or... well, not China -
India or the UK or America or wherever.
But it does something else that is less discussed:
it shatters unity, and it divides people.
It does this in two overarching ways.
The first is obvious:
it facilitates direct confrontation.
If you are a Hillary supporter during the election campaign,
you can row with Trump supporters online.
I've seen it happen over Brexit,
I've seen friends unfriend each other on Facebook over Brexit,
it facilitates direct confrontation.
But it does something else more subtle:
it creates what was called homophily, love of the like-minded.
Now, when you are on Facebook, you have your friends -
we understand "friends", OK? -
and most of your friends are likely to broadly share similar worldviews.
Now, I am not saying that everyone votes your party,
there are left, there are right,
but it's unlikely that anyone in this audience
is going to be friends with a bunch of Nazis ...
I would hope anyway.
So, what happens is,
first of all you are cocooned with like-minded individuals,
who post articles that tend to slant to your point of view.
Second, even more insidious, is the Facebook algorithm.
People think social media platforms are these impartial mediums,
but they are not.
They are capitalist enterprises and their product is us, their users.
The algorithm is designed
to keep us on their platforms for as long as possible
by feeding us content that we know we like.
So, if you're a Hillary supporter
and you're clicking on pro-Hillary links during the campaign,
the algorithm is going to feed you more and more pro-Hillary content,
and vice versa.
Thus are our prejudices reaffirmed and hatred of the other exacerbated.
There he is
in all his splendiferous stupidity!
So how did we get here, part 2.
The rise of social media has coincided with a crisis of faith in the West
and, critically, its institutions.
From the 2003 Iraq war,
in which our politicians took us to war on a lie,
to the 2008 global financial crisis,
in which the bankers took us into the Great Recession,
to the NSA Snowden spying revelations,
combined with long-term declines in media trust,
means that the fundamental institutions upon which the West is based
have been discredited.
As a result,
we see the rise of populist demagogues, nationalist demagogues,
Geert Wilders in Holland,
Nigel Farage with Brexit,
Marine Le Pen, recently in the French elections,
and of course the apotheosis of it:
Mr. Trump.
Sorry, there we go again.
So, what is the end result of all this?
The end result of all this is that we now live in a post-truth age.
Now, this has been defined.
This was Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year 2016,
and I am going to read out its definition
because I think it is worth thinking about.
It was defined as an adjective relating to or denoting circumstances
in which objective facts
are less influential in shaping public opinion
than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
This was supplemented by the president of the Oxford Dictionaries,
who said: "It is not surprising that our choice reflects a year
dominated by highly charged political and social discourse.
Fuelled by the rise of social media as a news source
and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment,
post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time."
Now, what are the problems?
The problems are that in both Europe and the US,
public broadcasters have to adhere to guidelines.
And these regard balance, impartiality, professional journalists, etc, etc, etc.
No such regulation exists for social media.
And the cost is plain to see.
Facebook, which has been named
as the platform most conducive to the spread of false stories,
has recently announced that is going to start using third-party fact-checkers,
people like Full Fact or Snopes.
It's going to self-police,
it's going to try in some way - imperfectly, in my opinion -
to combat the phenomenon.
But what are the results?
The results are, and this is very dangerous,
that the post-truth world has created the post-truth leader.
From Vladimir Putin, who reinvents reality in Eastern Ukraine,
to Donald Trump,
whose White House will tell you
his inauguration crowds were bigger than Obama's
when you can see that they weren't.
Now, they are different, let's be fair.
One is a dictator in all but name;
the other leads the world's most powerful democracy.
But, in each case, the goal is the same:
the more doubt you can sow in people's minds about all information,
the more you will weaken their propensity to recognize the truth when they see it.
The goal is not to twist the notion,
twist the truth,
like the politicians of old:
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman",
but to subvert the very notion that an objective truth exists at all:
"My crowds were bigger!" - "That's just an alternative fact."
So this is all very cheerful.
So I'd like to end on a slightly happier note.
What can we do to survive in this post-truth age?
Now, I believe, in the end,
change is going to have to come at the legislative level:
governments are going to have to intervene.
But I have put together, in the interim, a post-truth survival kit
to surviving, negotiating,
and trying to make your way
through this sick information environment, this unhealthy information environment,
in which we live.
One.
Go out of your way to friend or follow people
that don't necessarily agree with your worldview.
Please, don't go out and friend a bunch of Golden Dawn supporters,
but generally try and broaden your circles a bit.
Two.
Go directly to the websites of trusted news sources,
or, better still, buy the newspaper itself.
Read all of its reporting;
don't cherry-pick articles with a slant that appeals to your preexisting belief.
Three.
Read articles form publications
whose political views you don't agree with.
You will learn things.
Trust me.
Four.
Read books.
Yes, they still exist.
In fact, I would recommend you read one book in particular.
It's called: "War in 140 Characters:
How Social Media Is [Reshaping] Conflict [in] the Twenty-First Century."
It's available on Amazon, by your humble servant.
Well worth $30 of anybody's money.
Five.
Log off.
Get off Facebook, it will suck your life.
Leave the house.
Go and meet friends.
Have fun.
You will benefit.
Thank you very much!
(Applause)
Thank you! Thank you!
(Applause)