[Music] it was uh March 28th 2015 when I discovered this it was the the build sitong and I yeah was quite I got nuts to be fair uh when I saw the front page especially the part down there um about eating chocolate I mean I might be in the need for for looking for new diet Trends but uh the reason why I couldn't keep it for myself was uh we were working for two or three months to manage to get our bogus study on The Bu sitong and um not just the build sitong from there
um this study made it around the world uh Russia I mean even in Africa they were discussing a diet on chocolate um also fancy magazines in the US so why you must eat dark chocolate to lose weight so what I want to talk today about is like um because when we saw this like or when we discussed this like a from from point of few from nowadays it's like um the perfect blueprint on how to spread fake news it's pretty much like campaigns like we' seen in the US campaign in France also in Germany of
people with an agenda spreading fake news news and um that's what we did but let's start with the chocolate thing we did um if you look on the diet Market it's like there's hundreds and thousands of of uh of diets and they all promise this time it will work and we have the scientific base for that and uh so they um they're they're promising you um it nothing can go wrong and if it goes wrong it's all your fault because um we underly it with scientific proof and if you look at these studies uh that
underly uh This Promise yeah they're pretty much as bogus at the study I will show you we did ourself um because they either don't show a longtime effect which might be quite important if you want to lose weight or um they just get rid of the subjects that don't lose weight it's called Dropout and the the main idea is actually um we have studies from big companies where 50% of the subject don't end the study and it's pretty much not the people who actually losing weight that stopped doing a diet it's pretty much the ones
that uh where it doesn't work so um it's quite a perfect way of of dealing that because you get rid of all the people that uh that don't uh um make your point and um you just have a footnote at the end and saying yeah well we have 50% that dropped out so so we can't kind use the data and it will never appear in the press release and of course not in media and media plays quite an important role in uh in this business of of diets because it's not just the companies that want
to sell diets it's also like tapids and fancy magazines that uh yeah that profit from the idea and and the wish of losing weight and um so it wasn't that hard for us to to get into the market and we decided let's try and let's expose this model and so we started to do our own um scientific uh Challenge and we started to do our own uh study um to be fair I have no medical background and um even as we teamed up with a scientific journalist from the US and a GP from from Germany
at the end I ended up writing it myself in a in a weekend and just to copy the style of these uh these um yeah weight loss studies so let's have a look into it why this fantastic chocolate with high cooker content as a weight loose accelerator why we actually succeeded and why you should be quite skeptical if you actually read it and not actually publish it as media did so what we said is like the consumption of chocolate with a high cook content can significantly increase increase the success of weight loss diets and there's
a long-term weight loss um effect um and it's like it acts like a turbo so if you read something like this so far if you look into the study it took you like I would say 20 seconds because you of of course you start with the conclusion if you want to see what something someone is doing and so you should be skeptical I mean it's quite pretty much everything you need for a diet it's a long-term effect and it goes faster with chocolate so why not um uh why how can this be actually I mean
you should actually to be fair at this point even without reading you should throw it away because this can't be but you might invest another 30 seconds or another 10 seconds and um you go on and uh look in this study and you find some crafts I mean this is uh to be fair it's fair it's really proper data we try to do it a bit like this but so you end up at at graph number three and you see the chocolate group had five subjects and only four subjects were in the low carbohyd group
so already it's nine people nine people that were checked and if you look at the long-term effect it says day 21 so uh the long-term effect of three weeks uh it's quite convincing but um this is just a so so far you could actually after this you have to be sure this is rubbish um you you might be uh um able to to say okay I still I'm big believer in chocolate so let's try and check out the web website let's give a call at this Institute of diet we mean we we did lots of
work for do that we registered a website and uh we even printed a name Institute of diet on our our letter box um to be fair nobody who actually published this this stuff actually asked or give us a ring or did anything else I mean there are some broadsheet papers that didn't report on it but um there are lots of broad newspapers that didn't report on it but the typical um newspapers if you look at the Daily Mail they're very big in in in spreading medical Sensations um they all did without actually looking at it
and um the question is why I mean of course it's a it's a good story it was shortly before Easter so eating chocolate makes sense so it was really like um as the Australian uh TV show Australian Morning Show reported on it it's a funny story it's nice to to to report about it but at the end um it's still lying to your audience and um you could say where's the harm nothing really happens it's like uh all the the other diets on the market they're not much better so um nothing is actually wrong but
and there's the point where we come to to the question of of fake news is more like this behavior of some part of the media and especially if you look at this gossip stories where you quite be sure this can't be wrong that person a has done this or um if you look on on television uh lots of Des scripted reality where uh yeah of course in the titles it says at the end um some parts of this or all parts of this uh are scripted and are not really the reality but if you look
at the normal consumer of this wouldn't say TV but of this uh um of of this sort of TV and and who reads this tabloids they don't really see the big difference and then if you have the um an an consumer that uh that is is really a bit frustrated or is not really able to not not willing to understand anymore a more complicated world and it doesn't really watch news stations it doesn't really watch news programs so um they they don't see the big see the difference for them it's media lying to them because
of course they realize that um that's crypted reality isn't the reality so for them media lies and so uh for for years we managed to to lay the base and uh for for this whole fake news attempts so the whole uh problem actually grows and and goes goes a bit deeper if you look at how news is consumed today in uh in your Facebook Facebook feed and um where you not really see the the sources and so you you've got a a cliental of of of people who actually don't see that truth have a value
for itself because they are really educated by media that it doesn't really matter if it could be true why not broadcast it why not script something it's even better than the truth and so they feel quite um the the right to do the same so let's have a look again at this chocolate study and so um we we did pretty much the same thing as uh as people with an agenda do um spreading fake news we had an agenda we want to expose um tapids that they shouldn't uh that they don't do their research we
got multipliers because we got these in the newspapers and so we received an an maximum audience and that's pretty much what you do if you have an agenda I mean if you we say you are a um a dictator like uh person you uh you don't like homosexuality you don't like uh vest and democracy you like to invade in pen peninsulas especially when they are in the the Black Sea so your agenda might be uh you want to uh destabilize Western societies so what you do is using these kind of people um that are willing
to uh to to spread this fake stuff and to get a Maximum Impact and that what we have seen in the US but that what we have also seen in um in in the French election and in the in what we see or have seen in the in the in the past in in Germany and it's quite interesting what we see in the next months in the Germany election so what can we do about this and of course we have to take have to uh have to take care about it because I mean information is
the base of our democracy if we don't decide and differentiate between truth and could be truths or I want this to be truths um it's a total uh disaster and um it's not so easy actually to um to yeah to confront these people with the truth because they just don't care so what we have to do is like we really have to explain that facts and opinions are not really the same thing which probably won't work because um I have my facts you have yours which is not really an argument but um it uh yeah
it's it sticks so we have to uh have to really work on that truth itself is a value for it and it's it's something different that I want something and that something is the same thing and this happens on all levels actually I mean we have to engage in Facebook discussions we have to discuss with friends if they actually try to explain some stuff and we yes it's worth checking if it's true or not and of course I mean for leaders in the world it doesn't matter what color their houses have they they live in
we have to confront them and we have to keep them honest and have to keep them real so yeah this might help or not but um it's also quite important to keep in mind we are talking about the minority I mean it's it's really a loud minority and um that are spreading this stuff with helps of of other technical issues but at the end we have to take care that don't these guys don't win cheers [Applause]
