WEBVTT

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I first met Vitaly
in the spring of last year.

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He spoke little English,

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but he was very charming.

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On his left arm he had a tattoo
of the singer Marilyn Manson.

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On his right leg,
he had a tattoo of Winnie-the-Pooh.

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(Laughter)

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It was a rather strange experience.

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I was there to hear his story,

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and it was a story that
I would never have believed,

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had I not myself spent eight months
in the year of 2014

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in Ukraine covering the war
between Moscow and Kiev.

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Now, at around the same time,
in August 2014,

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Vitaly found himself
in St. Petersburg without a job.

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Vitaly was a journalist.

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But the website he worked for
had lost its funding.

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So he sent out endless applications.

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Heard nothing.

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Eventually something came back.

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He'd sent out so many,

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he couldn't even remember
which job it had been for.

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He went for an interview,
he duly got the job.

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It was at - sorry -

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OK - Let me just - Yeah -

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It was at a nondescript building
in the centre of St. Petersburg,

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55 Savushkina Street.

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And when Vitaly started,

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he realized it wasn't quite
your every day media company.

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He was assigned to a project
called "Ukraine 2".

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His job was to essentially write
articles about Ukraine -

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which was fair enough,

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I mean, it's a subject
of interest for Russians -

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with some slight differences.

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His job was to write articles

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from websites ending in ".ua".

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That is to say, websites
that pretended to be Ukrainian.

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So he would take for example a newspaper
called the Donetsk News,

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an Eastern city in Ukraine
occupied by pro-Russian separatists.

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And he would write articles about it.

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It wasn't too bad.

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He would stick to the basic facts.

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But he wasn't allowed to use
the word terrorist or separatist.

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He had to call them militia.

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The Ukrainian army, on the other hand,

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had to always be referred to
as volunteer battalions

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or national guards.

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These are battalions
that still exist today,

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that have well-deserved reputations

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for containing far-right
or thuggish elements.

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Now, as time passed,

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it became clear to Vitaly

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that he was working in what
later would become known to the media

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as a "troll factory" or a "troll farm".

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And the farm had a very clear structure.

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On the first floor was Vitaly
writing fake news websites,

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and his colleagues.

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The second floor
was a social media department.

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Here cartoons and memes were created

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to spread across all forms of platforms,
social media platforms,

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promulgating the Kremlin line on Ukraine.

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On the third floor were the bloggers.

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Now, there were two types of bloggers.

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The first were the "Ukrainian" bloggers

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who would blog about how terrible
the situation in Kiev was,

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how parts of the city
didn't have electricity,

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how the kindergartens
were running low on food.

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The second were the "American" bloggers.

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They would write about how the whole
of America supported Putin's actions,

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that Ukrainians were fascists,

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all sorts of things like this.

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Hilariously, or perhaps
bitterly hilariously, what would happen is

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the bloggers on the third floor,

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their output would become sources

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for the fake news articles
on the first floor.

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So, it was a merry-go-round of lies.

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Now, on the fourth floor
were the big time, big time trolls.

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These were the guys and women

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tasked with commenting
on Facebook, Twitter,

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and most of all, VKontakte,

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which is the Russian version of Facebook,

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a very, very popular
social media platform

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for the Kremlin
and the Russian government.

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Now, after a month of working
on the fake websites,

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Vitaly was sent
to the social media section.

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And his work began
to take a different turn.

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So, what he would have -

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When Vitaly was sent to this section,

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he was first given
a load of different SIM cards.

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To register on VKontakte,
you have to have a phone number.

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And the troll farm had
an inexhaustible supply.

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And his job was just to spam

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every, but every, page
you could think of with this -

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I mean often group pages
that have nothing to do with politics.

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One example, he spammed the site

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devoted to couples meeting up for sex
in a small Russian town.

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There was no logic to it.

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He always had to use female profiles,

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as females were seen to be
more trusted than male profiles.

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The second thing he had to do,

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and this is central to the dissemination
of information in the social media age,

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is it had to be visual.

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This is something I have learned

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from the State Department
to the Israeli Defence Forces,

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that if you want information,

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if you want people
to look at what you have to say,

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it has to be visual.

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And, in fact,

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people, even when they look at your link,
they probably won't click on it.

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So what you do, is you leave your message
in the meme, in the visuals.

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So here we have
a tearful looking picture of Obama.

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He's saying, "I want to start a war,
but none of my friends will join me."

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Here we have
a two-panel picture of Obama.

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On the first, he is looking very serious,
saying: "We don't talk to terrorists."

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The second panel, he is shown smiling:

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"We only sponsor them!"

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The goal was to attack

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people seen as hostile
to the Kremlin's war in Ukraine.

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That was Barack Obama, Angela Merkel
and leading Ukrainian politicians.

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Now, after a while, this got to Vitaly.

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He felt dirty,

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he didn't like the work he was doing,

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he was having problems with his nerves.

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So, in the end, he decided to quit.

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His boss, Anna, asked him why,
and he told her the truth.

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He said, "I don't believe in
what we're doing."

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So, he left.

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But still he couldn't get
the experience out of his mind.

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He felt like he had to make amends.

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So, he decided to write
an article about his experiences.

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He wrote it anonymously,

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and he presented it as if he were female.

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Because the majority of the
trolls farms' [employees] were [females].

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It came out, and it did well.

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It got a lot traction.

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Even [Alexei] Navalny,
the Russian opposition leader, tweeted it.

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Unfortunately, Vitaly's attempts
at anonymity had been less successful.

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An hour after it came out,

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he got a text from his boss Anna -

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or ex-boss -

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telling him that he thought he was a hero

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but he was, in fact,
a little son-of-a-bitch,

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who couldn't do anything for himself
but could only spoil the work of others.

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Then the phone calls started.

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"What the hell do you think you're doing?"

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a gruff male voice
called him up one night,

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"Don't you know people can get punched
in the face for this sort of thing?"

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For a while, Vitaly was afraid
to walk the streets alone.

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Now ...

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if you are tempted -

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Sorry, that's just Putin.

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I never get over that picture,
it kills me every time.

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If you are tempted
to dismiss Vitaly's story

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as just a bunch of internet nerds
playing around ... don't,

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because it is effective.

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I saw it for myself on the ground,

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in Eastern Ukraine as I travelled
through the cities, the occupied cities,

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that spring and summer of 2014,

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as they fell almost daily
to pro-Russia separatists.

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Now, Marshal McLuhan,
the Canadian philosopher said:

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"All media are extensions of some
human faculty, psychic or physical."

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Travelling through
Eastern Ukraine in 2014,

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it was as if Putin's
central nervous system were on display.

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The content that had come
from Vitaly's pen, directly,

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was all around me.

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The online world had seeped
into the offline reality.

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On the ground in Eastern Ukraine,

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old men parroted geopolitical concepts,

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like Novorossiya,

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a Czarist term referring to part
of Eastern Ukraine as belonging to Russia,

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that they barely understood.

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Teenagers, laughingly, showed me

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racist memes of Barack Obama
on their smartphone,

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knocked up in the troll factory.

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The belief that Kiev was a fascist junta,

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and that it genuinely wanted to destroy
the speaking of Russian in the East,

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was sincerely held.

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This was not, I realized, mere propaganda,

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it wasn't narratives;

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it was the reinvention of reality.

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Now, we have to ask:
How did we get here?

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Putin's information age could only
be possible in a post-truth age.

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And what has created this age
is social media.

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Now, social media brings
people together, we know this.

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It's transnational.

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You can speak to your friend
in India or... well, not China -

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India or the UK or America or wherever.

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But it does something else
that is less discussed:

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it shatters unity, and it divides people.

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It does this in two overarching ways.

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The first is obvious:

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it facilitates direct confrontation.

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If you are a Hillary supporter
during the election campaign,

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you can row with Trump supporters online.

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I've seen it happen over Brexit,

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I've seen friends unfriend
each other on Facebook over Brexit,

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it facilitates direct confrontation.

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But it does something else more subtle:

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it creates what was called homophily,
love of the like-minded.

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Now, when you are on Facebook,
you have your friends -

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we understand "friends", OK? -

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and most of your friends are likely
to broadly share similar worldviews.

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Now, I am not saying
that everyone votes your party,

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there are left, there are right,

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but it's unlikely
that anyone in this audience

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is going to be friends
with a bunch of Nazis ...

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I would hope anyway.

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So, what happens is,

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first of all you are cocooned
with like-minded individuals,

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who post articles that tend
to slant to your point of view.

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Second, even more insidious,
is the Facebook algorithm.

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People think social media platforms
are these impartial mediums,

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but they are not.

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They are capitalist enterprises
and their product is us, their users.

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The algorithm is designed

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to keep us on their platforms
for as long as possible

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by feeding us content
that we know we like.

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So, if you're a Hillary supporter

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and you're clicking on pro-Hillary links
during the campaign,

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the algorithm is going to feed you
more and more pro-Hillary content,

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and vice versa.

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Thus are our prejudices reaffirmed
and hatred of the other exacerbated.

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There he is

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in all his splendiferous stupidity!

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So how did we get here, part 2.

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The rise of social media has coincided
with a crisis of faith in the West

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and, critically, its institutions.

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From the 2003 Iraq war,

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in which our politicians
took us to war on a lie,

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to the 2008 global financial crisis,

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in which the bankers
took us into the Great Recession,

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to the NSA Snowden spying revelations,

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combined with long-term declines
in media trust,

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means that the fundamental institutions
upon which the West is based

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have been discredited.

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As a result,

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we see the rise of populist demagogues,
nationalist demagogues,

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Geert Wilders in Holland,

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Nigel Farage with Brexit,

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Marine Le Pen, recently
in the French elections,

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and of course the apotheosis of it:

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Mr. Trump.

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Sorry, there we go again.

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So, what is the end result of all this?

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The end result of all this is
that we now live in a post-truth age.

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Now, this has been defined.

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This was Oxford Dictionaries'
word of the year 2016,

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and I am going to read out its definition

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because I think
it is worth thinking about.

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It was defined as an adjective
relating to or denoting circumstances

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in which objective facts

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are less influential
in shaping public opinion

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than appeals to emotion
and personal belief.

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This was supplemented by the president
of the Oxford Dictionaries,

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who said: "It is not surprising
that our choice reflects a year

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dominated by highly charged
political and social discourse.

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Fuelled by the rise
of social media as a news source

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and a growing distrust
of facts offered up by the establishment,

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post-truth as a concept has been finding
its linguistic footing for some time."

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Now, what are the problems?

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The problems are that
in both Europe and the US,

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public broadcasters
have to adhere to guidelines.

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And these regard balance, impartiality,
professional journalists, etc, etc, etc.

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No such regulation
exists for social media.

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And the cost is plain to see.

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Facebook, which has been named

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as the platform most conducive
to the spread of false stories,

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has recently announced that is going to
start using third-party fact-checkers,

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people like Full Fact or Snopes.

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It's going to self-police,

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it's going to try in some way -
imperfectly, in my opinion -

00:13:34.367 --> 00:13:35.977
to combat the phenomenon.

00:13:36.784 --> 00:13:38.584
But what are the results?

00:13:38.827 --> 00:13:42.015
The results are,
and this is very dangerous,

00:13:42.025 --> 00:13:46.217
that the post-truth world
has created the post-truth leader.

00:13:46.657 --> 00:13:50.686
From Vladimir Putin, who reinvents
reality in Eastern Ukraine,

00:13:50.699 --> 00:13:52.205
to Donald Trump,

00:13:52.213 --> 00:13:54.087
whose White House will tell you

00:13:54.088 --> 00:13:56.510
his inauguration crowds
were bigger than Obama's

00:13:56.522 --> 00:13:59.109
when you can see that they weren't.

00:13:59.707 --> 00:14:01.749
Now, they are different, let's be fair.

00:14:01.749 --> 00:14:03.696
One is a dictator in all but name;

00:14:03.696 --> 00:14:06.191
the other leads the world's
most powerful democracy.

00:14:06.253 --> 00:14:08.859
But, in each case, the goal is the same:

00:14:09.091 --> 00:14:14.061
the more doubt you can sow
in people's minds about all information,

00:14:14.180 --> 00:14:18.430
the more you will weaken their propensity
to recognize the truth when they see it.

00:14:19.153 --> 00:14:21.476
The goal is not to twist the notion,

00:14:21.485 --> 00:14:22.736
twist the truth,

00:14:22.745 --> 00:14:24.415
like the politicians of old:

00:14:24.634 --> 00:14:27.074
"I did not have sexual relations
with that woman",

00:14:27.284 --> 00:14:31.490
but to subvert the very notion
that an objective truth exists at all:

00:14:31.498 --> 00:14:34.382
"My crowds were bigger!" -
"That's just an alternative fact."

00:14:35.926 --> 00:14:37.696
So this is all very cheerful.

00:14:38.188 --> 00:14:40.352
So I'd like to end
on a slightly happier note.

00:14:40.390 --> 00:14:43.747
What can we do to survive
in this post-truth age?

00:14:43.754 --> 00:14:46.078
Now, I believe, in the end,

00:14:46.078 --> 00:14:49.930
change is going to have to come
at the legislative level:

00:14:49.933 --> 00:14:52.219
governments are going
to have to intervene.

00:14:52.285 --> 00:14:55.975
But I have put together, in the interim,
a post-truth survival kit

00:14:56.337 --> 00:14:58.959
to surviving, negotiating,

00:14:58.959 --> 00:15:00.262
and trying to make your way

00:15:00.269 --> 00:15:04.205
through this sick information environment,
this unhealthy information environment,

00:15:04.205 --> 00:15:05.412
in which we live.

00:15:05.417 --> 00:15:06.551
One.

00:15:06.551 --> 00:15:08.649
Go out of your way
to friend or follow people

00:15:08.678 --> 00:15:11.108
that don't necessarily
agree with your worldview.

00:15:11.122 --> 00:15:14.235
Please, don't go out and friend
a bunch of Golden Dawn supporters,

00:15:14.235 --> 00:15:17.074
but generally try and broaden
your circles a bit.

00:15:17.335 --> 00:15:18.452
Two.

00:15:18.454 --> 00:15:22.177
Go directly to the websites
of trusted news sources,

00:15:22.182 --> 00:15:24.792
or, better still,
buy the newspaper itself.

00:15:24.799 --> 00:15:26.649
Read all of its reporting;

00:15:26.659 --> 00:15:31.212
don't cherry-pick articles with a slant
that appeals to your preexisting belief.

00:15:32.371 --> 00:15:33.394
Three.

00:15:33.394 --> 00:15:34.922
Read articles form publications

00:15:34.934 --> 00:15:37.624
whose political views
you don't agree with.

00:15:37.740 --> 00:15:39.380
You will learn things.

00:15:39.380 --> 00:15:40.526
Trust me.

00:15:40.531 --> 00:15:41.621
Four.

00:15:41.621 --> 00:15:42.761
Read books.

00:15:42.764 --> 00:15:44.478
Yes, they still exist.

00:15:44.498 --> 00:15:47.618
In fact, I would recommend
you read one book in particular.

00:15:47.670 --> 00:15:50.110
It's called: "War in 140 Characters:

00:15:50.126 --> 00:15:54.743
How Social Media Is [Reshaping] Conflict
[in] the Twenty-First Century."

00:15:54.754 --> 00:15:57.454
It's available on Amazon,
by your humble servant.

00:15:57.467 --> 00:16:00.247
Well worth $30 of anybody's money.

00:16:00.777 --> 00:16:02.178
Five.

00:16:02.178 --> 00:16:03.539
Log off.

00:16:03.741 --> 00:16:07.001
Get off Facebook, it will suck your life.

00:16:07.305 --> 00:16:08.595
Leave the house.

00:16:08.652 --> 00:16:09.912
Go and meet friends.

00:16:10.014 --> 00:16:11.008
Have fun.

00:16:11.121 --> 00:16:12.401
You will benefit.

00:16:12.497 --> 00:16:13.667
Thank you very much!

00:16:13.749 --> 00:16:16.389
(Applause)

00:16:16.804 --> 00:16:18.324
Thank you! Thank you!

00:16:18.444 --> 00:16:20.287
(Applause)