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If the powerful documentary How to Build a Truth Engine had to be compressed into two thematic strands they might be “how the human mind works” and “how our brain can be manipulated by information”. Director Friedrich Moser’s film takes us on a two-hour voyage of explanation, covering issues from cyber-warfare to elections, COVID to conflict and more.
Engaged citizens may find some of it they knew already. However, Moser offers a forensic and evidence-based delivery of how, why and the extent to which technology, events and the manipulation of both has had a powerful and deeply disconcerting impact on humans individually and collectively.
As an expert in American politics, who recently wrote on the crisis of truth in the current US election, I found How to Build a Truth Engine makes for sober but crucial viewing.
As our news cycles overflow with disinformation and fake news, this visually engaging film takes us on a calm, scientific tour of how we got to where we are – which is disinformation-central.
Experts in neuroscience, engineering and even folklore explain the ways in which we think and process information. As humans, our brains rely on steady, clear streams of data. When these streams become polluted, our capacity to process and understand reality is challenged, and our vulnerability to false narratives increases.
Clearly, lying for political purposes is as old as politics itself, but the capacity to disseminate these lies is now on a scale previously unimaginable, as the documentary shows.
Unsurprisingly, Moser’s production gives much attention to the plight of traditional journalism. It also focuses on the challenges we face as consumers of news now that the process through which information is filtered and considered fit for dissemination has been dismantled to an alarming extent.
The programme offers a stark reminder of the current state of conventional journalism, weakened by the migration of resources to online search engines where advertising and algorithms trump fact checking and truth telling.
Among the topics covered is the 2022 Russian invasion of Bucha in Ukraine, in which multiple civilians were killed, with bound bodies left in the streets. At the time, the Kremlin rebuffed Ukrainian allegations of war crimes as a fake narrative and went so far as to state that the civilian massacre was a staged event.
Western journalists, including New York Times staff, used satellite imagery to piece together events in the lead-up to the atrocity. As a result, they were able to verify what the Ukrainians had told them, but with the powerful addition of visual evidence, which transcended any “he said, she said” narrative.
If truth is the first casualty of war, this important use of technology for such crucial purpose offers a ripple of accuracy in an ocean of falsehood.
In highlighting the significance to the human brain of narrative and storytelling, the documentary offers chilling insights regarding the conspiracy theory path that led to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol in 2021. History is filled with tales of societies falling for false narratives, and the assault on the Capitol adheres to these criteria.
From stereotyping to the creation of insider-outsider narratives (where certain groups are presented as relatable and others as negative and untrustworthy), it is only a small leap to negative assumptions about those deemed outsiders. In the case of January 6 Capitol attack in 2021, the documentary makes clear the groundwork was laid long before any violence took place.
And so, we are reminded that the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen by Joe Biden was promoted, shared, amplified and repeated back (between Donald Trump, social media and sympathetic television networks) until the protesters were whipped into a frenzy. The result of this unchecked political propaganda was death and destruction.
Those in Moser’s film offer a chilling reminder that as long as the lie of the “Big Steal”, as it is known now, remains alive as truth in the minds of many Americans, then it can happen again. If the relentless pursuit of accuracy is a core component of journalism, we can see that this pursuit is under constant siege as lies propagate at lightning speed and citizens choose their own truths.
The documentary taps into the key question of our era: how do we know what we know? In an age of information warfare, truth is a valuable and vulnerable commodity. As humans, we have created technology so advanced that it is already outsmarting us.
And truth is often diluted, polluted or drowned out completely in our daily communication torrents. This, combined with the nefarious agendas of bad actors means that individuals, communities and our way of life are under significant threat. The consolation, as presented by Moser’s work, may be that technology can also get us out of this predicament. That’s assuming that we want it to.
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Clodagh Harrington does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
