How to Build a Truth Engine

A preview of Austrian director Friedrich Moser's George Clooney-backed documentary 'How to Build a Truth Engine'.

Transcript

00:00There's ground warfare, sea warfare, air warfare, but the most devastating of all is the information

00:10warfare.

00:11It's a really critical time for the world where the truth is under attack as never before.

00:18Stand up, kill for your country, take to the streets in your tens of billions.

00:26How have we come to a point in which we can believe such totally different versions of

00:32reality?

00:33I can't believe this is reality.

00:35There is some vulnerability in the human brain.

00:40We see patterns in places that they don't even exist.

00:44How can you tell truth from falsehood?

00:48The brain is what constructs a reality that we then try to understand.

00:54What we have is a huge publishing machine, and it happens at the speed of nanoseconds.

01:02How can a peaceful society turn into one in which horrible, large-scale atrocities happen?

01:10Storytelling is incredibly powerful.

01:11It's one of the ways we construct in-groups and out-groups, and once you've constructed

01:15another group as an out-group, it's incredibly easy to dehumanize them, and once you've dehumanized

01:20a group, they're no longer humans, so you can kill them.

01:27What we investigate often is the deepest levels of evil.

01:34People that are trafficked, people that are enslaved, narco-trafficking, terrorism, and

01:39money laundering on an industrial scale.

01:42I asked him, how do you verify this?

01:44And he showed me a satellite image, and I just thought, oh god, this is next-level journalism.