Techno-Truth - Codruța Simina

My name is Codruța Simina and I've been a journalist for 20 years, and for the last 10 years I've specialized in investigating online disinformation. And that means that when I go out with my colleagues for a beer, and they tell me that they've been around the country, met people, and fought various organized crime factions, I tell them that I went online.

I went online and managed to do some investigations that led Meta delete entire networks of pages that were amplifying false content for a party that was in power at the time, called PSD. We managed to delete many, many pages that were amplifying a senator, who you know because her name is Diana Șoșoacă. We managed to expose a party and a company that were behind a poisonous campaign that targeted our colleague Emilia Șercan.

The story I want to tell you tonight is about one of the investigations that has caused me the most frustration. And I want to start by telling you that the greatest asset you always bring into cyberspace is your attention. And I'm going to explain why.

At one point I received a link that was being reposted very quickly, it had gone viral on the groups that parties create to keep their members engaged to fill them with propaganda content. But this piece of content that we received had something very different from everything we had seen so far, namely it was an opinion poll created with an anonymous internet application and amplified with money in five European countries, one of which was Romania.

The problem with this opinion poll was primarily that it collected some very sensitive information about public perception in Romania because it asked questions about the degree of attachment of the respondents to Ukraine or how fair they considered the war in which Russia had invaded Ukraine or how much they supported Romania's position towards NATO or towards the European Union. And that was the moment when it seemed a little problematic to us and we started first and foremost trying to figure out who was behind this poll. At the same time, we were working with an editor who constantly told us that we couldn't really publish anything if we couldn't find out who was behind this campaign.

So we made some efforts, we managed to get to talk to Meta who told us that from their point of view there is absolutely nothing wrong with what is happening. We managed to get to the app that generated those surveys by asking, trying to find out who was behind them. Of course, we didn't get any answer from there either.

And that was when we had to get creative. I always talk in "plural" because I have an investigative partner who is an IT guy and we always work together because two heads are better than one. But when we had exhausted all the options we had in the network, we realized we had to go a step further, we had to think a little differently.

And then we thought that we still have an opinion poll in front of us, so maybe it would be very good to show it to a sociologist. And we also thought that we have this very complicated and very sensitive typology of questions that maybe it would be good to be seen by an expert in the history of the Eastern space. That's how we ended up with Mr. Mircea Chivu, who is a sociologist, and then we ended up with Cosmin Popa, who is an extraordinary historian, I think one of the few historian-experts in the Eastern space who knows the Russian language and this is very important to be able to work in this field.

We wrote both of them showing the survey and we received two responses that helped us to publish this material, even though we could not say exactly who was behind it. But, Mr. Mircea Chivu helped us a lot because he explained to us that in fact what we had in front of us was not an opinion poll, although it looked like an opinion poll, but it was what is called in marketing a push-poll. A push-poll is a marketing tool that looks like an opinion poll, moves like an opinion poll, but it is not that.

Its purpose is to induce some political ideas that you did not have before. Which helped us quite a lot because we were able to show that it is not an ethical practice and we were helped a lot by Cosmin Popa, who explained to us a detail that we had no way of finding out or how to get to. He told us that in some questions the topicality of the formulations and the answers looked exactly as if they had been translated by Google Translate from Russian to Romanian, because it used some terms that we have not used in the theory of war for about 20 years.

As such, we were able to put together this topic in which we show that a character or an entity that uses a marketing tool has access to the minds of people who are on the social network and who have the impression that when they click there and answer some questions, they are participating in some kind of collective good. It's just that while they were filling out that survey, we made an estimate and it turned out somewhere, that survey was filled out by about 120,000 users in Romania who also gave their personal data for this.

I told you this whole story because I would like you to be very careful about what happens there when you go online, not to give out your personal data and always to think about the more you interact with a page or an entity, what are the interests for which that entity or that page reaches you.

Why? Because there is a lot of misinformation on the internet and I'm basically used to talking about this, but I realized at some point that you can't just talk about fake news and misinformation, you have to take the step and start talking about the truth. Because, in fact, the truth is the value that we are deprived of, in the way that social networks deliver to us now, as mass-media, what we perceive as the truth. And I thought that the best way to talk about the truth is to go somewhere about 2500 years ago, to Ancient Greece, when the community had about the same problems that we have today.

Not social media, but there were these communities of sophists who were teachers who could teach you to argue anything. For them, the truth value or knowledge value of what they were teaching you to argue mattered less. Their desire was to make you win a political competition. What interested them was more a matter of convenience and not one of real knowledge. This is the moment when some guys appear that I really like and that we should read more often and quote more often, and they are Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

They realize that there is a problem with sophism because the moment you can argue anything and within the argument the frame of reference is no longer the truth, we lose our articulation of reality. As such, Socrates did a very nice campaign in which he taught people to recognize that they know that they know nothing and Aristotle gave an extraordinary definition of truth that I still find very beautiful today because it is composed of two parts.

 To say about what is, that it is, and about what is not, that it is not, this is the truth.

Somehow, over the last 2,500 years, this definition is still valid and I find it extraordinary, not only because it says that you have to talk and say about what is true, but also about what is not true that it is not true – and this might be more important. We wanted to take this step. Of course, there are, then, as we move forward in time, many philosophers who come and play with the definition of truth and give it new nuances and even change it in many places.

But the reason why truth is important and it has to be the basis of how we tell a story about the world is because 2 + 2 = 4 and it will make 4 in any context, from any direction we look at at, and this is more than just a convention between us. What I mean is that when 2 + 2 = 5, the people who think 2 + 2 = 4 may have to disappear. And that generally means some large social movements and genocide eventually.

The truth helps us protect our communities and always have a common frame of reference. And I think that's actually what pushes me, and what helps me for 10 years to do this work that I don't feel is as important as my other colleagues in investigative journalism, but which, at the same time, is important for these moments of awareness.

Try to use the definitions as they are in the textbooks, because there's a reason why they are that way. Always try to check this principle of coherence, of saying that what is, is, but also saying that what is not, is not. Thank you!