1
00:00:00,635 --> 00:00:03,256
I've been a journalist now since I was about 17,

2
00:00:03,256 --> 00:00:06,816
and it's an interesting industry to be in at the moment,

3
00:00:06,816 --> 00:00:09,152
because as you all know, there's a huge amount of upheaval

4
00:00:09,152 --> 00:00:11,632
going on in media, and most of you probably know this

5
00:00:11,632 --> 00:00:14,855
from the business angle, which is that the business model

6
00:00:14,855 --> 00:00:17,798
is pretty screwed, and as my grandfather would say,

7
00:00:17,798 --> 00:00:20,512
the profits have all been gobbled up by Google.

8
00:00:20,512 --> 00:00:22,856
So it's a really interesting time to be a journalist,

9
00:00:22,856 --> 00:00:25,940
but the upheaval that I'm interested in is not on the output side.

10
00:00:25,940 --> 00:00:29,035
It's on the input side. It's concern with

11
00:00:29,035 --> 00:00:31,533
how we get information and how we gather the news.

12
00:00:31,533 --> 00:00:34,604
And that's changed, because we've had a huge shift

13
00:00:34,604 --> 00:00:36,842
in the balance of power from

14
00:00:36,842 --> 00:00:38,859
the news organizations to the audience.

15
00:00:38,859 --> 00:00:41,074
And the audience for such a long time was in a position

16
00:00:41,074 --> 00:00:43,764
where they didn't have any way of affecting news

17
00:00:43,764 --> 00:00:46,031
or making any change. They couldn't really connect.

18
00:00:46,031 --> 00:00:47,507
And that's changed irrevocably.

19
00:00:47,507 --> 00:00:50,396
My first connection with the news media was

20
00:00:50,396 --> 00:00:54,207
in 1984, the BBC had a one-day strike.

21
00:00:54,207 --> 00:00:57,495
I wasn't happy. I was angry. I couldn't see my cartoons.

22
00:00:57,495 --> 00:01:00,042
So I wrote a letter.

23
00:01:00,042 --> 00:01:02,891
And it's a very effective way of ending your hate mail:

24
00:01:02,891 --> 00:01:05,978
"Love Markham, Aged 4." Still works.

25
00:01:05,978 --> 00:01:08,989
I'm not sure if I had any impact on the one-day strike,

26
00:01:08,989 --> 00:01:11,671
but what I do know is that it took them three weeks to get back to me.

27
00:01:11,671 --> 00:01:13,831
And that was the round journey. It took that long for anyone

28
00:01:13,831 --> 00:01:16,024
to have any impact and get some feedback.

29
00:01:16,024 --> 00:01:18,506
And that's changed now because, as journalists,

30
00:01:18,506 --> 00:01:21,672
we interact in real time. We're not in a position

31
00:01:21,672 --> 00:01:24,006
where the audience is reacting to news.

32
00:01:24,006 --> 00:01:27,763
We're reacting to the audience, and we're actually relying on them.

33
00:01:27,763 --> 00:01:30,149
They're helping us find the news. They're helping us

34
00:01:30,149 --> 00:01:34,919
figure out what is the best angle to take and what is the stuff that they want to hear.

35
00:01:34,919 --> 00:01:38,823
So it's a real-time thing. It's much quicker. It's happening

36
00:01:38,823 --> 00:01:44,740
on a constant basis, and the journalist is always playing catch up.

37
00:01:44,740 --> 00:01:47,373
To give an example of how we rely on the audience,

38
00:01:47,373 --> 00:01:51,910
on the 5th of September in Costa Rica, an earthquake hit.

39
00:01:51,910 --> 00:01:54,236
It was a 7.6 magnitude. It was fairly big.

40
00:01:54,236 --> 00:01:57,116
And 60 seconds is the amount of time it took

41
00:01:57,116 --> 00:01:59,681
for it to travel 250 kilometers to Managua.

42
00:01:59,681 --> 00:02:03,826
So the ground shook in Managua 60 seconds after it hit the epicenter.

43
00:02:03,826 --> 00:02:06,482
Thirty seconds later, the first message went onto Twitter,

44
00:02:06,482 --> 00:02:09,343
and this was someone saying "temblor," which means earthquake.

45
00:02:09,343 --> 00:02:11,680
So 60 seconds was how long it took

46
00:02:11,680 --> 00:02:13,586
for the physical earthquake to travel.

47
00:02:13,586 --> 00:02:16,146
Thirty seconds later news of that earthquake had traveled

48
00:02:16,146 --> 00:02:19,120
all around the world, instantly. Everyone in the world,

49
00:02:19,120 --> 00:02:22,317
hypothetically, had the potential to know that an earthquake

50
00:02:22,317 --> 00:02:24,731
was happening in Managua.

51
00:02:24,731 --> 00:02:27,082
And that happened because this one person had

52
00:02:27,082 --> 00:02:31,031
a documentary instinct, which was to post a status update,

53
00:02:31,031 --> 00:02:33,563
which is what we all do now, so if something happens,

54
00:02:33,563 --> 00:02:35,645
we put our status update, or we post a photo,

55
00:02:35,645 --> 00:02:39,423
we post a video, and it all goes up into the cloud in a constant stream.

56
00:02:39,423 --> 00:02:42,184
And what that means is just constant,

57
00:02:42,184 --> 00:02:44,590
huge volumes of data going up.

58
00:02:44,590 --> 00:02:46,871
It's actually staggering. When you look at the numbers,

59
00:02:46,871 --> 00:02:49,862
every minute there are 72 more hours

60
00:02:49,862 --> 00:02:51,244
of video on YouTube.

61
00:02:51,244 --> 00:02:54,526
So that's, every second, more than an hour of video gets uploaded.

62
00:02:54,526 --> 00:02:58,782
And in photos, Instagram, 58 photos are uploaded to Instagram a second.

63
00:02:58,782 --> 00:03:02,538
More than three and a half thousand photos go up onto Facebook.

64
00:03:02,538 --> 00:03:06,246
So by the time I'm finished talking here, there'll be 864

65
00:03:06,246 --> 00:03:09,864
more hours of video on Youtube than there were when I started,

66
00:03:09,864 --> 00:03:13,727
and two and a half million more photos on Facebook and Instagram than when I started.

67
00:03:13,727 --> 00:03:17,659
So it's an interesting position to be in as a journalist,

68
00:03:17,659 --> 00:03:20,075
because we should have access to everything.

69
00:03:20,075 --> 00:03:22,973
Any event that happens anywhere in the world, I should be able to know about it

70
00:03:22,973 --> 00:03:26,904
pretty much instantaneously, as it happens, for free.

71
00:03:26,904 --> 00:03:30,069
And that goes for every single person in this room.

72
00:03:30,069 --> 00:03:32,679
The only problem is, when you have that much information,

73
00:03:32,679 --> 00:03:34,966
you have to find the good stuff, and that can be

74
00:03:34,966 --> 00:03:36,954
incredibly difficult when you're dealing with those volumes.

75
00:03:36,954 --> 00:03:39,273
And nowhere was this brought home more than during

76
00:03:39,273 --> 00:03:42,177
Hurricane Sandy. So what you had in Hurricane Sandy was

77
00:03:42,177 --> 00:03:45,204
a superstorm, the likes of which we hadn't seen for a long time,

78
00:03:45,204 --> 00:03:48,347
hitting the iPhone capital of the universe -- (Laughter) --

79
00:03:48,347 --> 00:03:52,562
and you got volumes of media like we'd never seen before.

80
00:03:52,562 --> 00:03:55,306
And that meant that journalists had to deal with fakes,

81
00:03:55,306 --> 00:03:58,222
so we had to deal with old photos that were being reposted.

82
00:03:58,222 --> 00:04:00,470
We had to deal with composite images

83
00:04:00,470 --> 00:04:03,653
that were merging photos from previous storms.

84
00:04:03,653 --> 00:04:08,887
We had to deal with images from films like "The Day After Tomorrow." (Laughter)

85
00:04:08,887 --> 00:04:11,721
And we had to deal with images that were so realistic

86
00:04:11,721 --> 00:04:14,091
it was nearly difficult to tell if they were real at all.

87
00:04:14,091 --> 00:04:18,404
(Laughter)

88
00:04:18,404 --> 00:04:22,128
But joking aside, there were images like this one from Instagram

89
00:04:22,128 --> 00:04:24,404
which was subjected to a grilling by journalists.

90
00:04:24,404 --> 00:04:26,637
They weren't really sure. It was filtered in Instagram.

91
00:04:26,637 --> 00:04:29,160
The lighting was questioned. Everything was questioned about it.

92
00:04:29,160 --> 00:04:31,453
And it turned out to be true. It was from Avenue C

93
00:04:31,453 --> 00:04:33,613
in downtown Manhattan, which was flooded.

94
00:04:33,613 --> 00:04:35,713
And the reason that they could tell that it was real

95
00:04:35,713 --> 00:04:37,802
was because they could get to the source, and in this case,

96
00:04:37,802 --> 00:04:39,909
these guys were New York food bloggers.

97
00:04:39,909 --> 00:04:41,939
They were well respected. They were known.

98
00:04:41,939 --> 00:04:45,031
So this one wasn't a debunk, it was actually something that they could prove.

99
00:04:45,031 --> 00:04:47,949
And that was the job of the journalist. It was filtering all this stuff.

100
00:04:47,949 --> 00:04:50,660
And you were, instead of going and finding the information

101
00:04:50,660 --> 00:04:53,227
and bringing it back to the reader, you were holding back

102
00:04:53,227 --> 00:04:55,287
the stuff that was potentially damaging.

103
00:04:55,287 --> 00:04:58,245
And finding the source becomes more and more important --

104
00:04:58,245 --> 00:05:01,979
finding the good source -- and Twitter is where most journalists now go.

105
00:05:01,979 --> 00:05:05,132
It's like the de facto real-time newswire,

106
00:05:05,132 --> 00:05:08,099
if you know how to use it, because there is so much on Twitter.

107
00:05:08,099 --> 00:05:10,484
And a good example of how useful it can be

108
00:05:10,484 --> 00:05:14,017
but also how difficult was the Egyptian revolution in 2011.

109
00:05:14,017 --> 00:05:16,663
As a non-Arabic speaker, as someone who was looking

110
00:05:16,663 --> 00:05:18,964
from the outside, from Dublin,

111
00:05:18,964 --> 00:05:20,756
Twitter lists, and lists of good sources,

112
00:05:20,756 --> 00:05:24,378
people we could establish were credible, were really important.

113
00:05:24,378 --> 00:05:26,887
And how do you build a list like that from scratch?

114
00:05:26,887 --> 00:05:29,317
Well, it can be quite difficult, but you have to know what to look for.

115
00:05:29,317 --> 00:05:32,175
This visualization was done by an Italian academic.

116
00:05:32,175 --> 00:05:35,569
He's called André Pannison, and he basically

117
00:05:35,569 --> 00:05:37,744
took the Twitter conversation in Tahrir Square

118
00:05:37,744 --> 00:05:41,198
on the day that Hosni Mubarak would eventually resign,

119
00:05:41,198 --> 00:05:43,830
and the dots you can see are retweets, so when someone

120
00:05:43,830 --> 00:05:46,609
retweets a message, a connection is made between two dots,

121
00:05:46,609 --> 00:05:49,219
and the more times that message is retweeted by other people,

122
00:05:49,219 --> 00:05:52,425
the more you get to see these nodes, these connections being made.

123
00:05:52,425 --> 00:05:54,347
And it's an amazing way of visualizing the conversation,

124
00:05:54,347 --> 00:05:57,058
but what you get is hints at who is more interesting

125
00:05:57,058 --> 00:05:59,739
and who is worth investigating.

126
00:05:59,739 --> 00:06:02,618
And as the conversation grew and grew, it became

127
00:06:02,618 --> 00:06:04,902
more and more lively, and eventually you were left

128
00:06:04,902 --> 00:06:09,683
with this huge, big, rhythmic pointer of this conversation.

129
00:06:09,683 --> 00:06:11,492
You could find the nodes, though, and then you went,

130
00:06:11,492 --> 00:06:13,786
and you go, "Right, I've got to investigate these people.

131
00:06:13,786 --> 00:06:15,500
These are the ones that are obviously making sense.

132
00:06:15,500 --> 00:06:17,809
Let's see who they are."

133
00:06:17,809 --> 00:06:20,499
Now in the deluge of information, this is where

134
00:06:20,499 --> 00:06:23,706
the real-time web gets really interesting for a journalist like myself,

135
00:06:23,706 --> 00:06:25,680
because we have more tools than ever

136
00:06:25,680 --> 00:06:28,437
to do that kind of investigation.

137
00:06:28,437 --> 00:06:31,446
And when you start digging into the sources, you can go

138
00:06:31,446 --> 00:06:33,745
further and further than you ever could before.

139
00:06:33,745 --> 00:06:37,097
Sometimes you come across a piece of content that

140
00:06:37,097 --> 00:06:40,557
is so compelling, you want to use it, you're dying to use it,

141
00:06:40,557 --> 00:06:43,232
but you're not 100 percent sure if you can because

142
00:06:43,232 --> 00:06:44,439
you don't know if the source is credible.

143
00:06:44,439 --> 00:06:46,621
You don't know if it's a scrape. You don't know if it's a re-upload.

144
00:06:46,621 --> 00:06:48,330
And you have to do that investigative work.

145
00:06:48,330 --> 00:06:50,674
And this video, which I'm going to let run through,

146
00:06:50,674 --> 00:06:53,663
was one we discovered a couple of weeks ago.

147
00:06:53,663 --> 00:06:55,862
Video: Getting real windy in just a second.

148
00:06:55,862 --> 00:07:00,750
(Rain and wind sounds)

149
00:07:00,750 --> 00:07:03,917
(Explosion) Oh, shit!

150
00:07:03,917 --> 00:07:06,854
Markham Nolan: Okay, so now if you're a news producer, this is something

151
00:07:06,854 --> 00:07:09,406
you'd love to run with, because obviously, this is gold.

152
00:07:09,406 --> 00:07:11,669
You know? This is a fantastic reaction from someone,

153
00:07:11,669 --> 00:07:14,239
very genuine video that they've shot in their back garden.

154
00:07:14,239 --> 00:07:17,733
But how do you find if this person, if it's true, if it's faked,

155
00:07:17,733 --> 00:07:20,391
or if it's something that's old and that's been reposted?

156
00:07:20,391 --> 00:07:22,617
So we set about going to work on this video, and

157
00:07:22,617 --> 00:07:25,477
the only thing that we had to go on was the username on the YouTube account.

158
00:07:25,477 --> 00:07:27,828
There was only one video posted to that account,

159
00:07:27,828 --> 00:07:29,316
and the username was Rita Krill.

160
00:07:29,316 --> 00:07:32,608
And we didn't know if Rita existed or if it was a fake name.

161
00:07:32,608 --> 00:07:35,521
But we started looking, and we used free Internet tools to do so.

162
00:07:35,521 --> 00:07:38,829
The first one was called Spokeo, which allowed us to look for Rita Krills.

163
00:07:38,829 --> 00:07:41,211
So we looked all over the U.S. We found them in New York,

164
00:07:41,211 --> 00:07:43,973
we found them in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Florida.

165
00:07:43,973 --> 00:07:46,622
So we went and we looked for a second free Internet tool

166
00:07:46,622 --> 00:07:49,089
called Wolfram Alpha, and we checked the weather reports

167
00:07:49,089 --> 00:07:51,586
for the day in which this video had been uploaded,

168
00:07:51,586 --> 00:07:53,469
and when we went through all those various cities,

169
00:07:53,469 --> 00:07:56,965
we found that in Florida, there were thunderstorms and rain on the day.

170
00:07:56,965 --> 00:07:59,610
So we went to the white pages, and we found,

171
00:07:59,610 --> 00:08:02,534
we looked through the Rita Krills in the phonebook,

172
00:08:02,534 --> 00:08:04,106
and we looked through a couple of different addresses,

173
00:08:04,106 --> 00:08:07,422
and that took us to Google Maps, where we found a house.

174
00:08:07,422 --> 00:08:09,337
And we found a house with a swimming pool that looked

175
00:08:09,337 --> 00:08:12,255
remarkably like Rita's. So we went back to the video,

176
00:08:12,255 --> 00:08:15,226
and we had to look for clues that we could cross-reference.

177
00:08:15,226 --> 00:08:18,441
So if you look in the video, there's the big umbrella,

178
00:08:18,441 --> 00:08:20,286
there's a white lilo in the pool,

179
00:08:20,286 --> 00:08:22,726
there are some unusually rounded edges in the swimming pool,

180
00:08:22,726 --> 00:08:24,780
and there's two trees in the background.

181
00:08:24,780 --> 00:08:27,207
And we went back to Google Maps, and we looked a little bit closer,

182
00:08:27,207 --> 00:08:29,878
and sure enough, there's the white lilo,

183
00:08:29,878 --> 00:08:32,872
there are the two trees,

184
00:08:32,872 --> 00:08:34,858
there's the umbrella. It's actually folded in this photo.

185
00:08:34,858 --> 00:08:38,636
Little bit of trickery. And there are the rounded edges on the swimming pool.

186
00:08:38,636 --> 00:08:41,786
So we were able to call Rita, clear the video,

187
00:08:41,786 --> 00:08:43,872
make sure that it had been shot, and then our clients

188
00:08:43,872 --> 00:08:47,066
were delighted because they were able to run it without being worried.

189
00:08:47,066 --> 00:08:48,841
Sometimes the search for truth, though,

190
00:08:48,841 --> 00:08:53,250
is a little bit less flippant, and it has much greater consequences.

191
00:08:53,250 --> 00:08:56,233
Syria has been really interesting for us, because obviously

192
00:08:56,233 --> 00:08:58,914
a lot of the time you're trying to debunk stuff that can be

193
00:08:58,914 --> 00:09:02,713
potentially war crime evidence, so this is where YouTube

194
00:09:02,713 --> 00:09:05,070
actually becomes the most important repository

195
00:09:05,070 --> 00:09:09,220
of information about what's going on in the world.

196
00:09:09,220 --> 00:09:11,974
So this video, I'm not going to show you the whole thing,

197
00:09:11,974 --> 00:09:14,695
because it's quite gruesome, but you'll hear some of the sounds.

198
00:09:14,695 --> 00:09:17,023
This is from Hama.

199
00:09:17,023 --> 00:09:19,993
Video: (Shouting)

200
00:09:19,993 --> 00:09:23,897
And what this video shows, when you watch the whole thing through,

201
00:09:23,897 --> 00:09:26,658
is bloody bodies being taken out of a pickup truck

202
00:09:26,658 --> 00:09:29,263
and thrown off a bridge.

203
00:09:29,263 --> 00:09:32,044
The allegations were that these guys were Muslim Brotherhood

204
00:09:32,044 --> 00:09:34,919
and they were throwing Syrian Army officers' bodies

205
00:09:34,919 --> 00:09:37,853
off the bridge, and they were cursing and using blasphemous language,

206
00:09:37,853 --> 00:09:40,235
and there were lots of counterclaims about who they were,

207
00:09:40,235 --> 00:09:42,477
and whether or not they were what the video said it was.

208
00:09:42,477 --> 00:09:45,743
So we talked to some sources in Hama who we had been

209
00:09:45,743 --> 00:09:48,076
back and forth with on Twitter, and we asked them about this,

210
00:09:48,076 --> 00:09:51,890
and the bridge was interesting to us because it was something we could identify.

211
00:09:51,890 --> 00:09:54,804
Three different sources said three different things about the bridge.

212
00:09:54,804 --> 00:09:57,066
They said, one, the bridge doesn't exist.

213
00:09:57,066 --> 00:10:00,590
Another one said the bridge does exist, but it's not in Hama. It's somewhere else.

214
00:10:00,590 --> 00:10:03,152
And the third one said, "I think the bridge does exist,

215
00:10:03,152 --> 00:10:06,516
but the dam upstream of the bridge was closed,

216
00:10:06,516 --> 00:10:09,913
so the river should actually have been dry, so this doesn't make sense."

217
00:10:09,913 --> 00:10:12,525
So that was the only one that gave us a clue.

218
00:10:12,525 --> 00:10:13,750
We looked through the video for other clues.

219
00:10:13,750 --> 00:10:16,839
We saw the distinctive railings, which we could use.

220
00:10:16,839 --> 00:10:20,583
We looked at the curbs. The curbs were throwing shadows south,

221
00:10:20,583 --> 00:10:22,900
so we could tell the bridge was running east-west across the river.

222
00:10:22,900 --> 00:10:24,856
It had black-and-white curbs.

223
00:10:24,856 --> 00:10:26,842
As we looked at the river itself, you could see there's

224
00:10:26,842 --> 00:10:29,796
a concrete stone on the west side. There's a cloud of blood.

225
00:10:29,796 --> 00:10:31,530
That's blood in the river. So the river is flowing

226
00:10:31,530 --> 00:10:33,227
south to north. That's what that tells me.

227
00:10:33,227 --> 00:10:35,576
And also, as you look away from the bridge,

228
00:10:35,576 --> 00:10:37,225
there's a divot on the left-hand side of the bank,

229
00:10:37,225 --> 00:10:39,655
and the river narrows.

230
00:10:39,655 --> 00:10:42,234
So onto Google Maps we go, and we start

231
00:10:42,234 --> 00:10:44,292
looking through literally every single bridge.

232
00:10:44,292 --> 00:10:47,772
We go to the dam that we talked about, we start just

233
00:10:47,772 --> 00:10:51,382
literally going through every time that road crosses the river,

234
00:10:51,382 --> 00:10:53,120
crossing off the bridges that don't match.

235
00:10:53,120 --> 00:10:54,883
We're looking for one that crosses east-west.

236
00:10:54,883 --> 00:10:56,835
And we get to Hama. We get all the way from the dam

237
00:10:56,835 --> 00:10:58,838
to Hama and there's no bridge.

238
00:10:58,838 --> 00:11:01,322
So we go a bit further. We switch to the satellite view,

239
00:11:01,322 --> 00:11:04,242
and we find another bridge, and everything starts to line up.

240
00:11:04,242 --> 00:11:07,280
The bridge looks like it's crossing the river east to west.

241
00:11:07,280 --> 00:11:10,441
So this could be our bridge. And we zoom right in.

242
00:11:10,441 --> 00:11:13,343
We start to see that it's got a median, so it's a two-lane bridge.

243
00:11:13,343 --> 00:11:16,989
And it's got the black-and-white curbs that we saw in the video,

244
00:11:16,989 --> 00:11:19,301
and as we click through it, you can see someone's

245
00:11:19,301 --> 00:11:22,255
uploaded photos to go with the map, which is very handy,

246
00:11:22,255 --> 00:11:24,942
so we click into the photos. And the photos start showing us

247
00:11:24,942 --> 00:11:27,564
more detail that we can cross-reference with the video.

248
00:11:27,564 --> 00:11:31,287
The first thing that we see is we see black-and-white curbing,

249
00:11:31,287 --> 00:11:33,392
which is handy because we've seen that before.

250
00:11:33,392 --> 00:11:36,891
We see the distinctive railing that we saw the guys

251
00:11:36,891 --> 00:11:39,242
throwing the bodies over.

252
00:11:39,242 --> 00:11:41,897
And we keep going through it until we're certain that this is our bridge.

253
00:11:41,897 --> 00:11:43,421
So what does that tell me? I've got to go back now

254
00:11:43,421 --> 00:11:45,734
to my three sources and look at what they told me:

255
00:11:45,734 --> 00:11:47,459
the one who said the bridge didn't exist,

256
00:11:47,459 --> 00:11:49,318
the one who said the bridge wasn't in Hama,

257
00:11:49,318 --> 00:11:53,271
and the one guy who said, "Yes, the bridge does exist, but I'm not sure about the water levels."

258
00:11:53,271 --> 00:11:56,602
Number three is looking like the most truthful all of a sudden,

259
00:11:56,602 --> 00:11:59,583
and we've been able to find that out using some free Internet tools

260
00:11:59,583 --> 00:12:02,103
sitting in a cubicle in an office in Dublin

261
00:12:02,103 --> 00:12:03,590
in the space of 20 minutes.

262
00:12:03,590 --> 00:12:06,029
And that's part of the joy of this. Although the web

263
00:12:06,029 --> 00:12:09,294
is running like a torrent, there's so much information there

264
00:12:09,294 --> 00:12:12,481
that it's incredibly hard to sift and getting harder every day,

265
00:12:12,481 --> 00:12:15,808
if you use them intelligently, you can find out incredible information.

266
00:12:15,808 --> 00:12:18,203
Given a couple of clues, I could probably find out

267
00:12:18,203 --> 00:12:21,737
a lot of things about most of you in the audience that you might not like me finding out.

268
00:12:21,737 --> 00:12:24,742
But what it tells me is that, at a time when

269
00:12:24,742 --> 00:12:28,771
there's more -- there's a greater abundance of information than there ever has been,

270
00:12:28,771 --> 00:12:31,404
it's harder to filter, we have greater tools.

271
00:12:31,404 --> 00:12:33,267
We have free Internet tools that allow us,

272
00:12:33,267 --> 00:12:35,493
help us do this kind of investigation.

273
00:12:35,493 --> 00:12:37,316
We have algorithms that are smarter than ever before,

274
00:12:37,316 --> 00:12:39,737
and computers that are quicker than ever before.

275
00:12:39,737 --> 00:12:43,164
But here's the thing. Algorithms are rules. They're binary.

276
00:12:43,164 --> 00:12:44,949
They're yes or no, they're black or white.

277
00:12:44,949 --> 00:12:48,503
Truth is never binary. Truth is a value.

278
00:12:48,503 --> 00:12:53,167
Truth is emotional, it's fluid, and above all, it's human.

279
00:12:53,167 --> 00:12:55,274
No matter how quick we get with computers, no matter

280
00:12:55,274 --> 00:12:57,658
how much information we have, you'll never be able

281
00:12:57,658 --> 00:13:00,654
to remove the human from the truth-seeking exercise,

282
00:13:00,654 --> 00:13:04,312
because in the end, it is a uniquely human trait.

283
00:13:04,312 --> 00:13:08,312
Thanks very much. (Applause)