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All right… Welcome everyone. We begin with one word: Security — because that word among all the words in our dictionaries is the most important. In 1943 American psychologist Abraham Maslow defined the human hierarchy of needs. And his most interesting observation was, that needs form layers that support other layers of needs. At the very bottom
you have your physiological needs, like getting something to drink, getting something to eat, staying warm during the winter. And you if you fulfil all that, you free up your mind and can focus on the next layer, establishing security so you can feel safe. Then you can focus on the next layer: Love. And the next layer: Esteem. And at the very top: Self-actualization.
If you interview people on the streets of Vienna, surprisingly many will say that the most important word is love, and that's because we live in a part of the world where our fundamental needs are so well covered, that we completely forget about the importance of security.
But if you live in Russia, and the person you love is dragged into a van by a violent police force and sent to a Russian gulag for 19 years, north of the Arctic Circle, then you are acutely aware that without security everything else is at risk.
For decades security politics has been a neglected Topic in our media. But then one day, thousands of tanks and armored vehicles and 150,000 soldiers crossed the border to Ukraine — beginning the largest, most dangerous, most violent war since World War II.
This is now our most prevalent mental image of what a security threat is, because we fear that one day, the front line over there could come close. But I'm here to tell you the war is already here. Not in the physical domain where you and I are
at a nice hotel having a good time in a wonderful City, but in the digital domain we are already under attack, and that's what I'm here to talk about. In the Western World we feel so safe, we spend most of our time in Pursuit Of Love esteem and self-actualization We are brought up to believe in meritocracy — the idea that the most qualified always wins.
From an early age we give grades to school children, and we tell them that those with the best grades get the best educations, the best jobs, and live the most happy successful lives. We learn through what Seymour Papert has called constructionist learning. We interact with our world and we build up mental models of what we see. And especially here in Europe, we live by the
premise that by working together, we can build anything and achieve anything — for a common good. I'm thankful for living in this part of the world and I certainly hope so are you. But it is this positive culture that has left us blind to the fact that much of the world outside of cultural bubble does not work that way at all. Now there is an interesting, striking depiction
of our ignorance in the movie "The Dark Knight". In a scene where Batman's butler, seen here on the left, realises that Batman doesn't understand the Joker, the super villain of the movie. So Alfred says, "Some men aren't looking for anything logical they can't be bullied recent or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
This is what we have overlooked! We live by the premise that the world works in this logical constructive way, we see in our daily lives. But our culture is not the norm. This is why the people we choose to lead us make the mistake of thinking that even dictators can be reasoned with. As late as February 7, 2022, French president Emanuel Macron was still trying
to reason with Vladimir Putin, and he was not the only one sitting at that table. This was right before the war broke out, after an entire year of intelligence reports showing us that indeed Russia was about to attack Ukraine. He was sitting there even after intelligence had told us that Russia had moved blood supplies to the Border — something which an army would never do,
unless they were about to attack and would have a lot of casualties they needed to treat. This core belief that fundamentally the world is good, and surely everyone can be reasoned with, is what permeates our entire culture. This is why 45 percent of all the gas we used in Europe prior to the war came from this man over there on the left — even after 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, we just
kept on buying. And here comes the point to all this: With you here today you have all brought your smartphones. And to this day, our social media platforms are still wide open to foreign influence. Because we think that open collaboration across the global world will always bring something good.
But in reality, these social media platforms are now a key instrument in our enemy's attack on democracy. What you see as constructive platforms for interaction, others see as a digital weapon of mass destruction — a tool for polluting the minds of millions. So in this presentation I will tell you
why we are under attack, how we are under attack, and what we can do about it. But before we get to that, a quick vocabulary cheat sheet: I'll be talking a lot about information, misinformation and disinformation. Now, if someone should have forgotten the difference, let me quickly clear that up. Information is anything we know and can communicate.
So now you know what information is, because I just communicated it. Misinformation is the subset of information which is false. So if by accident I tell you something which is wrong, then it's misinformation. But if tell you something wrong because I want to deceive you, trick you into doing something for me, then that's disinformation — that's the deliberate part.
So just separate it by thinking information informs, misinformation misses the truth, and disinformation deceives. All right… We begin with, "Why are we under attack?" There are 193 countries on planet Earth, but only 74 of those countries are democracies — again: We are not the norm.
If we had never invented the Internet, or if we had never created social media, dictators around the world could just continue oppressing their own people, and isolating their own people. but Innovation cannot be stopped, and with the exception of perhaps Kim Yun in North Korea, all other dictators have adopted most innovations including the internet of course.
Because they want to stay competitive — they want to be lucrative. So in the information age, dictators are now fighting to stay in control. In Russia, Putin's regime has created a system called SORM, which is installed at each and every internet service provider; and it allows them to surveil what information each and every citizen spreads through the internet.
And if anyone shares information that doesn't comply with the official Kremlin narrative, that is the proof they need for an arrest. But can you guess what the most installed app in Russia is on mobile right now? What type of app do you think is the most installed app?
You guessed it! Here is a top five, and as you can see, both the first place is a VPN connection, and the third place is another product which is a VPN connection, and if you go down that list you find even more of these VPN connections, because the Russian people want to surf the Internet free from Putin's prying eyes. So that is Putin's problem — he has to allow some internet use, because he
wants to stay competitive. But as soon as he opens that window just a tiny bit, especially young Russians can feel the winds of change. Now a quick disclaimer: I'll be talking a lot about Russia in this presentation, and I feel it's it's a good thing to stress that I don't have a grudge with the Russian people. But I'm here to talk about the information war,
and a key actor in the information war is the Russian regime so that is what my criticism is aimed at. In dictatorships, freedom of information is like a virus which infects the people and opens their eyes to reality. In 2011 Facebook and Twitter was used by the Syrian people to organize pro-democracy protests which turned into an uprising which
could have show overthrown Bashar al-Assad. Since 2018 we've seen The Second Arab Spring with protests all over North Africa and The Middle East. Because the problem with information is, people get informed. They realize that in their countries the regimes accumulate all the wealth, while ordinary people struggle. This is why dictators see The Free World as a threat.
this animation shows the expansion of NATO throughout history. Putin has spent countless speeches talking about what he calls "Illegal NATO expansion". Because as more and more democratic countries of their own free will have joined NATO, Putin is losing influence, and in the process The Free World is closing in on his dictatorship.
Stalin could get away with oppressing his people, because the common Russian never realized the world could be any different. But modern Generations see the truth through the internet: The freedom we have here is the alternative to Putin. This is the reason we are in the middle of the most dangerous
information war in the history of mankind. This is why Russia is spending billions on developing the most sophisticated information weapon in the history of the world — a weapon which will one day become… The mindbomb. Every narrative in Putin's regime is a product of propaganda. From the from the school books which show a very different, distorted view on World War II,
to every daily news episode on Russian State TV, the purpose of every piece of information is to forge a distorted view on reality in which Putin is the only solution. This is why the truth covered by Western media media and shared every day through social
media is a threat to Vladimir Putin. And that is why he has launched an international war on truth. Our Western culture is scientific. Science is our systematic way of organising our knowledge. We observe the world, we document our findings, we prove our assumptions. Our logic dictates that either something is true or it is false and through that Paradigm we build an ever growing
foundation of known truths, which elevates our knowledge. Not only in the classical Sciences but in all modern Fields. Police detectives use scientific methods to uncover the truth. Journalists use systematic research to uncover the truth. Truth has become our mindset. But this is not how the world Works outside our cultural bubble. There's an excellent video online
(which you can look up) of Russian TV host Olga Skabeyeva giving a lecture to young students in the city of Kaluga south of Moscow. Here she says [quote:] "It doesn't fully matter what is happening [around you]. an event may be taking place, but it's the interpretation of the event that matters. This is the age of post-truth. There is truth or perhaps there is no truth
— that is not important. What is important is their attitude or our attitude to an event that occurred." And she continues: "If an air strike occurs in Kharkiv, their interpretation could be that the strike on Kharkiv is an aggression. But in our view all that we are doing is creating a sanitary zone.
And if we consider ourselves patriots it is better to believe and follow the state's point of view. Some will call this propaganda but it's just common sense because there is no objective information — only information someone paid for." [end quote] This quote sends shivers down my
spine literally every time I read it, because imagine building a society on the principle that there is no truth how do you collaborate in a culture where every straight line is a curve that bends to the will of the dictator. The post-truth reality in Russia is key to understanding why we often fail to understand Putin's regime. We look in disbelief when we see Russian soldiers
commanded to cross an open field straight into Ukrainian machine gun fire — wave after wave of meaningless death — we think to ourselves, "No regime, no government anywhere could ever get away with giving that kind of orders". But remember Olga Skabeyeva's words: There is no truth
only interpretation. Her job and the job of every one of her colleagues is to replace truth with whatever narrative Putin desires. Her job is to reprogram the minds of millions, and it is this job which has now become an international job, targeting every one of you. To Putin's war on truth, social media is a gift, because from 2012 until now the amount of time we spend on
social media has risen by 59 percent. We now spend 2 hours and 23 minutes on social media every day. So if you're behind on your laundry or haven't vacuumed recently — there's your answer! And this is the key difference between us and our parents, because they lived in a world where information flowed from pen to paper.
It flowed from newspapers to subscribers, or from government controlled TV stations to viewers — each piece of information subject to careful consideration before it was communicated. Journalists were Gatekeepers deciding which stories to write. Editors were Gatekeepers deciding which stories to print. And our media laws prevented disinformation.
In the old days people living in the same Village would often share the same beliefs. And if someone did not conform to those beliefs would be reprimanded, and be considered outsiders. But in our time, people who were once seen as these outsiders now create villages online, where their views are normalized. Some believe the Earth is flat, and on social media they build villages of flat earthers.
Some voters in America believed the migrants were eating their cats and dogs, and if you go on Truth Social you'll see that even their president-elect believes that to be true, or claims to believe that to be true of course. In a few decades we've moved from the age of truth we see here, where a girl is reading about the moonlanding in 1969 in a newspaper created by real journalists responsible for
accurately reporting the truth, to the age of misinformation we see here: This example is an anonymous account with 10,000 followers on Truth Social, which is spreading misinformation about the moonlanding, discrediting one of our most important technological achievements in the 20th century.
But before we start questioning our beliefs because we see this picture, let me show you what the real Apollo 11 Mission looked like. There are a few problems here… You see, color photography became standard in the 1960s which is why the photos of the moon landing were in fact color photos. There were no stars visible on the horizon because the astronauts
were were in fact working in the intense bright daylight you can see on the ground. Look at the ground — that looks like being outside in in bright daylight on Earth, and because the moon has no atmosphere, the sky above is not blue but pitch black, which is consistent with what you see when you see video from The International Space Station today. Yet in the misinformation post, somehow there's a mountain range,
and there's a white sky above. The astronauts were quite small compared to the lunar lander and They Carried these large bulky backpacks with their life support systems. And notice that there was an American flag on it, and a NASA logo, because everybody wanted to show: We did that! I showed this photo to a Danish filmmaker and he informed me that the cameras they had at the time were analog. This one is an electrical camera, which
wasn't invented until… or didn't become widespread until 20 years later. The analog cameras they had they had at the time were much larger, and they had these large rolls of analog film on top. So obviously, this couldn't have been the way they filmed a fake moon landing. I'm sorry? [Comment from the audience]
And if our Jewish friend here was in fact filming a fake moon landing, every real cameraman on the planet will tell you, those sunglasses are not helpful for looking through the lens. Now that I've mentioned all those inaccuracies, we can all see that the Truth Social post is the fake one, but many individuals cannot, when they scroll through Truth Social. And that is why disinformation works. Social media is the very reason truth is threatened — why our ability to
see the world clearly is threatened. Any military expert will tell you that on a real battlefield NATO would be unbeatable to an increasingly weakened Russia. But in this unmoderated vulnerable social media space, our truth is an easy target. And that brings us to how we are under attack.
The misinformation post we just saw was the work of an amateur, but let me show you how the professionals work. In Russia, agents are tasked with influencing the opinion of European voters. And Putin's main problem with Europe right now is that we are the strongest supporters of Ukraine. I know, many of you think that the US is the strongest supporter of Ukraine, but if you measure it financially, Europe is far beyond the United States.
And this war is currently costing Putin an entire one-third of his state budget. Next year his gas income will decrease to 110 billion euro, and his military expenses will increase to 160 billion euro, creating a deficit that makes the Russian state savings evaporate at an alarming rate. So to change the European view on Ukraine — your view, and my view on
Ukraine — this is what the agents in Russia came up with. They searched the internet and found a video recorded and shared by freelance journalist Luc Auffret. This video is from December last year, where French Farmers protested against low salaries and poor working conditions, by blowing a mix of manure and straw on the Regional Council in the city of Dijon — an event which had nothing to do with Ukraine.
But luckily for the Russian agents, this Regional Council building is not easily recognizable — it's not the Vienna Town Hall or anything, right? And that gave them flexibility. And even better the Regional Council supports Ukraine so they have a Ukrainian flag outside. Bingo! — There's the narrative. The Russian agents claim that the farmers are dumping manure on the Ukrainian Embassy, because that is
how much Farmers hate Ukraine. The agents even created a fake letter, purporting to show the Ukrainian Ambassador writing a message, scolding the farmers saying, end your protests it's much more important to support your government, because your government supports Ukraine! — now we have a conflict. Let me show you the video, here's the result…
oh, I should mention one thing… If you want to convince people that something fake is real, use a credibility enhancer, and that's what the agents did. They took the visual identity of a French news network called Euronews, which is based in Lyon, and they put their logo and all their graphics and everything, their fonts — they used all of that from Euronews to deceive people into thinking this was indeed real.
And here's the result… Here you see the video… And they added some text, so they didn't have to narrate it. Here comes the letter… They have they've written a whole letter — it's quite impressive… Alleged to be from the Ambassador which it obviously is not, and they even added his signature, only the person adding the signature couldn't find the ambassador's
signature online, so that's not his signature. They brought in some video of the Farmers Union's president to make it seem like he had a conflict with the Ambassador, and then for identification for common people they even threw in at the very end some video of a woman in a supermarket, to make it seem like ordinary people hate Ukraine too.
Disinformation attacks like this one can be found all over the Internet. They are effective because they have a viral aspect to them, and they are shared and viewed by millions, and especially on X they are rarely taken down, because of poor content moderation. Our lack of platform oversight is the furnace where Putin's to post-truth world is forged.
This attack is a classic example of information Warfare, and when I use that term, what I mean is the manipulation of information trusted by a target (in this case everyone in this room, and everyone in France and Europe in general), without the targets awareness, (people who watched this video will very likely have thought that this was a real video from Euronews), so that the target will make decisions
against their interest, in the interest of the attacker. That interest could be for you and I to vote for parties that would end the support for Ukraine, like Rassemblement National in France or AFD in Germany. The reason Putin can carry out these attacks is, he has built an impressive mass information warfare capability.
at his RT News Network alone he employs 2,900 employees, financed by 260 million euro worth of state subsidies every year. RT abuses the identities of many. In this case Euronews, but in a recent American example RT was camouflaged as six popular American podcasters whom they paid enormous salaries to bring "news" which were
in fact fabricated in Moscow. RT is an enemy with many faces. All of this has improved over time so now, to understand how dangerous it's become, let us look at four generations of mass information warfare. Information warfare is as old as the history of war. And it actually used to be about getting your enemy
forces to believe a lie. There's a famous example from World War II, where the UK managed to get a Spanish double agent to deliver false information to the Nazis telling them that D-Day would occur on a different date, at a different location, and with different divisions.
But the advent of mass media has made it possible to target entire populations. Mass media has become so popular, we pay for the receivers… to receive the propaganda which is meant to deceive us. A good example of that is Der Volksempfänger, which René showed a little earlier.
That was a cheap, simple radio receiver, and it was the brainchild of Joseph Goebbels — the Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany. It was presented in 1933 and it was designed to meet the price point of one week salary, allowing them to sell 12.5 million units before the war,
so propaganda could flow freely to the ears of the masses. Now fast forward to 1993… Ferdinand Nahimana was a politician in the African country of Rwanda, and he had written articles in the 80s revealing his racism towards an ethnic minority called the Tutsi. But writing articles was not particularly effective
because at the time in Rwanda, only half the population could read. So in '93 he created his own radio station, which was called RTML. It played pop music mixed with a bit of propaganda — negative news stories about the Tutsi. It escalated to a point… over its first year… it escalated to a point where
The Tutsi population were described — and I apologize — as cockroaches that needed to be killed. In the genocide that followed, 500,000 Tutsi were slaughtered, and for that Nahimana was sentenced to life in prison by the international criminal tribunal. Now fast forward to 2022 where Donald Trump launched his own social media platform.
We all know Trump is a liar… But ironically he named his medium Truth Social — the very name is deceptive! For two entire years Trump usedTruth Social to spread lie after lie, completely unbounded by any laws or any moderation — he decided what was going to be moderated on his platform. And he has now been
elected president in the United States — the richest country on Earth — and by January 20 next year he will be the Commander in Chief of the most dangerous, most deadly army in the world this is how dangerous propaganda is. In spite of history no politicians are trying to stop this
because they do not fully understand social media — mind you, on Capital Hill senators in Washington have assistants running their social media accounts. Not just because they don't have the time — they don't know how. And in the EU we've done too little to stop it too, but a train full of consequences have has now arrived at our station because Trump is President, and he wants
to pull out of NATO and stop the aid to Ukraine. Of course, there is a vast difference between using traditional mass media like print or radio as we see here, and using modern social media. So let me now show you, how Mass information Warfare has evolved. In the first generation it looks like this… When traditional mass media are used, I call it first generation mass information warfare,
which I define as using on the ground agents — like in Rwanda — with a known physical identity to spread disinformation through traditional mass media. These first generation attacks can be effective, but they are easy to prevent, because they are tied to that mass medium, and we can make laws that prevent propaganda from flowing through that mass medium.
But since Facebook came online in 2004, social media has increasingly become an important news source. From a European study, we know that TV is still one of the primary news sources, but the problem is 37 percent now indicate that social media has become one of the primary news sources. And from 2022 to 2023,
illustrated by the different colors, TV declined by 4 percentage points, while social media was up by 11. Every time an old person dies, one more TV set is turned off, and a new social media user is born. This is what enables second generation mass information warfare,
which I define as using remote agents (with one or more social media accounts) to spread disinformation online. The main advantage of second generation attacks are, we are now decoupled from the place where the attack occurs. And this means, there are two advantages. The attacker will not go to prison — his only risk is to have his social media account closed, at which point he just
creates a new one and continues the attack. The second advantage is, he bypasses all the media laws that we have put in place. Because… and that's for historic reasons due to something which happened in the United States… the same regulation does not apply to social media. Those who build and and service and run social media are not responsible for the content provided,
in the same way as traditional media. This attacker bypasses all the gatekeepers like journalists and editors. For full efficiency, the second generation attacks are typically backed by some some for of credibility enhancer, such as stealing the visual identity of Euronews, but also often by creating fake news websites, where it looks like a real website — you see news and then
they are shared on social media. So when you click the link you come to news site and you get the false impression that it is real news. And once these stories go viral, ordinary people who repost them unwittingly become credibility enhancers as well. Fortunately second generation attacks do not leave us without options, and in September this year, the United States Justice Department took down 32 of these fake sites.
They looked like CNN, they looked like Fox News, but they carried propaganda, and all the news stories were fabricated in Moscow. Had they not been taken down Russia would have had even more fake news to spread, during the US presidential elections, but this was at least one battle they lost in the information war. Now, the downside to Second Generation attacks is they are still very labor intensive, therefore limiting
the effectiveness of the attacks. And this brings us to third generation mass information warfare, which I define as using remote agents equipped with advanced automated systems for controlling thousands of social media accounts, to both spread disinformation but also to carry out behavioral attacks on social media platforms. And let me explain… (This is what is popularly called bot farms.)
There are several signs, this is the state-of-the-art in Russia at the moment. Instead of creating social media accounts manually, phone farms are used to generate an endless stream of social media accounts, which are fed into a central system. And all these accounts are then controlled through software that allows
the attacker to direct all these fake accounts like a bot army. In just one operation in July, intelligence services in the US in Canada and the Netherlands identified 968 bot accounts on the social media platform X. The 968 is the number which they wrote In the initial
request to get a search warrant from a judge, but the actual number of accounts taken down once the operation completed will have been much higher — in the thousands likely. Here's a page from that search warrant and the interesting thing is, by law the FBI agent is required to fill out some fields and he checks off boxes, indicating he wants to investigate for evidence.
But he doesn't check off the fourth box, to search for a person to be arrested. That's the whole problem with this generation of mass information warfare — you can take down the operation but you can never arrest the attacker. this particular attack was information based, but we also see behavioral attacks.
And behavioral attacks are for instance, placing likes or dislikes on a social medium, to have the content algorithm prioritize or deprioritize certain content you want to promote or demote. Or by replying with a myriad of generic comments that misleads everyone into thinking that a post is unpopular or very popular.
Imagine being a politician in the EU and you're running for election, and you say that you support Ukraine, but suddenly 500 accounts reply, "We should support Vladimir Putin — he's the only true leader". And finally behavioral attacks are used for mass reporting of content, for violating terms of service, in hopes that accounts are taken down.
What I've showed you so far is what we know exists, but now let's take a look into the future. So far with each generation, attackers have improved their efficiency, but all our attacks have been limited by one bottleneck: The cost of human resources. In third generation attacks we improved upon this by introducing software that automate
the work, but we are still limited by the number of agents we have. And this is not only limiting to the offensive operations themselves, it is also limiting to… or it also increases the risk of detection. Because real humans are complex. Maybe you took a selfie of yourself on the train this morning, and shared it on social media, because that's what ordinary people do.
I didn't post something on social media, because I needed to sleep throughout the night — that is real human behaviour. And that tells the logs, that tells the FBI agents that we are indeed real. And at least at this point in time, the resources in Russia do not allow for them to control all these thousands of bot accounts, and have some someone sit there typing and
pretending to be a real human being, so it's easy to see the difference. I've seen many of these bot counts — take a look at that for 30 seconds you are absolutely certain this is not a real human being. They're only used for the attack. They don't pretend to have real relations and say, "Oh that was an interesting thing you told me last week", and you know all all those kinds of comments that we would normally come up with.
But this is where fourth generation mass information warfare begins. In fourth generation warfare, seen here on the right, the direct control of the bots is replaced with AI. Using AI we can define artificial personalities with artificial social media behaviour, that will make it increasingly difficult to detect the bots.
Imagine it's the year 2029, and Russia has just finished configuring the new AI bot Army. One of the bots is named Alice Ivy. On weekdays she gets up at 7:00, and then she spends a few minutes on X. Then she takes a shower for 15 minutes, and then she comes back. She spends some more time on X, and she likes a few posts.
She even writes some replies to the posts, and all of that tells the system. that indeed she is a real human being — her account should not be closed. And even worse, it tells you that she's real. Because on her profile it says, she likes gardening. And she just hit the like button on your post about gardening.
So you think, Alice must be real, and she seems nice and she lives in your area and you decide to follow her. And when you interact with her your credibility is projected onto her — everyone who follows you sees that you interact with her, and then they think she's real, and they follow her too. The problem is, Alice is just one of a million artificial life forms simulated on servers.
And each of these life forms are tailored to meet different audiences, meet different needs, perhaps even meet your taste in women — what do I know. They leave you much more exposed. And at some point, you get to the elections here in Austria, and you notice that Alice Ivy starts liking political views. She starts
following certain parties. She starts liking politicians who do not support Ukraine. That my friends, is the mind bomb. That is the fourth generation mass information warfare which will be built to overturn democracies, if we do not stop our number one enemy right now.
And our politicians are not realising what is coming. In Finland they see Russia as a threat, and they spent 380 million euros on building an old school steel fence on the border. The FSB in Moscow must be laughing. Finally, I will say, "Fear not, because we have options".
here are four counter measures that we can all take today. 1. Identify and report the bots. When you see odd social media behaviour — when you see something which seems strange, have a look at those accounts. I promise you, if you start looking for Russian bots you will start recognising them. Their behaviour is different — still at least.
2. Avoid anonymity online if you can at all — because a room full of an anonymous accounts, is where the bots thrive. If you can be yourself online like I am, the bots become the outsiders. 3. Build a strong social network. Take responsibility for the content you provide online. Verify that it is accurate, follow people, join others who
do the same. If we build healthy information cities online, the bots become the outsiders and become easily recognisable. And the most important choice: 4. Choose resilient social media. And by "resilient", I mean social media which have a strong defence mechanism against disinformation. If your social medium has been
bought by an American billionaire, who fired 80 percent of the workforce because he thought content moderation wasn't necessary, choose a better platform. I'm just mentioning this as an example, but I have chosen Mastodon. Because the content algorithm on Mastodon is killer to disinformation. The algorithm is… does anyone know?
There is no algorithm — all the content that you see in your feed is from the people you follow. So if you follow real people, you only get real content, and every time they repost something someone else said, they have looked at that content and have verified, this is real, this is good information. — That is resilient social media!
I will end with a short paraphrase of what an intelligent character once said: The propaganda is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it if you hold up your phone. When you open X or Tik Tok or Facebook. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Now in this talk, I've told you what the information war is, but you have to see it for yourself. And of course this gives you a choice… You take the blue pill, and the story ends. You wake up tomorrow and believe whatever propaganda narrative you want to believe. You take the red pill, and you join me.
You stay here in Wonderland, where we are right now, where we can all see what it is. Join me in this fight, and you will realise how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember… All I'm offering you is the truth. Thank you.
We have time for one question only um and then we have to start the next talk… I just take you. Thank you. What do you think about the Digital Services act at the European Union, that wants to regulate large social media platforms, also regarding disinformation? I think it's awesome. I don't know, if it covers everything but I think it's an awesome and very
necessary initiative, and actually it's one of the reasons why I hoped Kamala Harris was elected. Because often when we make legislation in the EU, it has a certain effect on America, and where America is headed. But right now, they've elected a president who owns a social media platform, and one of his most main advisors is a guy who owns X.
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