Fact, fiction and politics in a post-truth age | David Patrikarakos | TEDxAthens

In this talk, David analyses the trend of fake news worldwide. From Russia to the American Elections and beyond, from Twitter to Iran.

David Patrikarakos is an international author, journalist and producer with an extensive track record in high-end international affairs. As a foreign correspondent, he has reported from across the world for a variety of leading US, UK and international publications.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

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)