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‘How to Build a Truth Engine’ Review: A Sobering but Fatally Flawed Doc on Disinformation
Friedrich Moser's 'How to Build a Truth Engine' brings the “fake news” era into terrifying focus, before falling victim to it as well.
Initially, explanations of neurons, synapses and psychological processes feel logistically disconnected from the movie’s focus on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as a team of reporters pores over satellite imagery, raw video footage and recovered recordings of phone calls in order to unearth potential war crimes covered up by the Russian government. Its seemingly scattered anecdotes about people’s affinity for pattern recognition eventually lock like jigsaw pieces into a larger disconcerting portrait of political movements fueled by bigotry, as the film portrays not only the outcome and appearance of propaganda, but the emotional and psychological holes that it fills. As various experts denote the way fascist regimes have historically dehumanized vulnerable groups, the film makes the curious decision to invoke — albeit briefly — last year’s Oct. 7 attacks in Israel as a parallel to these atrocities, and it begins this brief detour by deploying an alleged phone call from a Hamas member relaying his actions to his parents.
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