How to build a Truth Engine

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

Vienna, October 2024

I have spent the last 5 years working on a documentary film about the fight against fake news and disinformation. I accompanied investigative journalists from the New York Times and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists as well as computer scientists from UCLA and UC Berkeley who have built software that can autonomously detect conspiracy theories online. They are working closely with neuroscientists from UCLA, whose research with epilepsy patients has revealed a lot about how information is processed in the brain at the level of individual neurones.

HOW TO BUILD A TRUTH ENGINE took me on a journey from the information battlefields of our time into the innermost recesses of our brains, during which two things became increasingly clear:

First, those who can hack our information feed, can hack our mind.

Second, if we lose our grip of the truth, we will lose our civilisation.

Friedrich Moser
producer | director | d.o.p.
HOW TO BUILD A TRUTH ENGINE

LOGLINE
A documentary about how our biological hard-wired neurological behaviour makes us so susceptible to misinformation, and what we can do about it.