Hi everybody -

In this week’s show we started a kind of live experiment, and just 24 hours after the episode dropped we’re already getting some positive data in! 

If you haven’t listened to this week’s episode please do – I talked to a journalist, John Reed (no known relation!), who works for a tech startup called Pyrra which has developed a software that sucks in tons of daily posts from more than 40 social media platforms, and then uses AI to figure out what ideas – “top narratives” Pyrra calls them – are forming across the internet. The goal is to identify stories that are percolating online which could then jump into the mainstream and become news. As an exercise, John talked me through the top narratives Pyrra found online from this past week, with the idea that we all – Question Everything and listeners together – could keep an eye on them and see if they gain steam as real news stories. 

John said of all the online narratives Pyrra found this week, the one he thought had the most likelihood of becoming something we’ll have to contend with in the real world had to do with the recent round of presidential elections in Romania. This was not on my radar at all: Basically there’d been a surprise winner – a relatively unknown far-right NATO-skeptic Putin-praising candidate named Cǎlin Georgescu. People raised concerns that Russia had meddled in the election. As of Monday, when I spoke to John, a recount had been ordered and the Romanian constitutional court was reviewing the vote. And John was seeing early chatter online claiming that the recount was the result of meddling by Western powers – the CIA or Western countries interfering to stop the candidate the people of Romania chose. 

Well just this morning, the story burst into the news. A BBC headline: Romanian court annuls result of presidential election first round. 

The court has invalidated the election and called for a redo. Which is pretty remarkable, and seems certain to sow more distrust and conspiracies. According to the BBC, the decision “comes after intelligence documents were declassified, suggesting Georgescu benefitted from a mass influence operation – conducted from abroad – to interfere with the result of the vote.”

My question for this experiment with Pyrra was: can an AI program that’s analyzing what people are saying in corners of the internet flag important stories to look out for ahead of time. I think the news out of Romania this morning is a clear check in the “yes” column. 

I just logged onto Pyrra to see what the updated chatter is since the news broke about the election do-over. A lot of it is in Romanian but here’s a smattering of English posts.

From 4chan:

Bluesky:

Reddit:

Pretty interesting, huh? As they say: watch this space!

Have a great weekend.

Brian