Tomáš Dvořák is a copywriter at a digital agency, which in itself suggests that he is a writer; including poetry, music and theatre improvisation under the pseudonym Tom Cortés. He relies on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), primarily drawing new news from dozens of Twitter and Telegram accounts linked to key institutions, media, agencies, bloggers and volunteers. It also uses a wide range of mapping/geolocation tools and OSINT database tools to identify and verify information.
You announced the award on your social media and added that you were surprised because you won your last medal at primary school in cricket ball throwing. So, I guess you were surprised by the award?
Yes, very much so. I actually thought it was some kind of joke. I know what the recipients usually have to achieve to get a medal from Masaryk University. So I still find it very, very incredible.
Your nomination has passed the scientific council and is related to your activities in the Today in Ukraine project. How did it come about that you regularly report on events in this area?
All my writing has had a development. I studied political science at the International Relations Department of the Prague University of Economics and Business. Although my travels eventually took me somewhere else, I´ve been interested in politics for a long time and I also write political op-ed pieces. In 2013, I started writing and reporting on events in eastern Ukraine. In my civilian profession I am a digital advertising and social media specialist, and I was interested in the conflict in the east partly because of the various methods of propaganda that could be shown. How social networking algorithms are used to spread it. I had my followers and I tried to do some outreach on the subject as well. My audience was quite small but I considered the events of the time as a historical moment. I suspected it would be a big deal one day. Then when the full-scale invasion came, I actually knew the background, I had a sense of why and how the conflict came about, who the players were. And the reactions to my texts were suddenly different. The information started to spread much faster, the viewership grew by leaps and bounds from month to month.
Every day you describe what´s going on, and you give a lot of relevant links. How challenging is that and does anyone help you with that?
About a year and a half ago, Facebook was testing new algorithms in connection with the war, and I started getting various bans. That's when other people stepped up to help me get the daily reports out. My colleague Miroslav Suchý joined me and created a website and to this day everything I write is uploaded to it; so that if there is any blocking by Facebook, the reports have a place to go. At the same time, we recently started backing up the reports to medium.seznam.cz. This way we have broken out of the social media bubble and the reports can have a reach among the news media. One or two people also regularly help me with moderating discussions and proofreading.
Why are you doing this?
In the beginning, it was purely because I needed to find my way around the conflict myself. By writing a text, I´m using one of the methods by which one gets rid of emotions – writing and handing it over to people. Then I saw the demand for information from Ukraine in the media market. There were no people in the media who had been following the conflict for ten years and were up to date. It was clear that people wanted information; they wanted relevant data and links so that they could be convinced that what was being written was true. I said to myself that this is an activity that has a chance to help. And I made it my private war.
You are working through difficult topics every day, which is definitely mentally challenging. How do you escape it? How do you deal with what you see in the war within yourself?
Badly. I had a big crisis sometime in the first year of the war. You´re just not ready to watch and process so much of that content. It took a toll on my personal ties, on my relationships. Eventually, I established a certain way of processing the information. I have a specific amount of time set aside for work where I am mentally prepared to accept even drastic content. Only once have I not followed through. A person who volunteers in Ukraine sent me a video in a private message. Basically, a filmed Russian war crime. I clicked on it at a time when I wasn´t ready for it and it affected me severely for a few weeks. I was also worried about sleeping because I knew I would dream about it.
Is it even possible to accept it?
In time, you´ll grow numb. I rarely get caught off guard anymore. Maybe specific stories about specific people.
How much do you wish you could stop writing about what is happening in Ukraine?
Very much. I have a lot of hobbies that I want to pursue to the fullest, but I´ll keep writing about it all while the war is active. I have to admit I didn´t believe the war would last that long. I was convinced it would be a war of months, but certainly not years. The Russian propaganda was really strong and everyone, including me, thought that Russia was really as strong as it claimed to be. I was surprised that Ukraine has been able to defend itself effectively to this day. And it means that my plan to write about it for a few months has become writing indefinitely. And there's no end in sight.
Let’s change the subject, what do you do as a profession? You´re a social media advertising specialist. Can you describe that?
I specialize in social networks and the digital environment as a whole; in how and what kind of advertising works in digital. Besides that, I do music under the pseudonym Tom Cortés, and also improvisational theatre, so I´m part actor, part theatre maker. And I´m also the author of the lyrics for the Karol and Kvido project, which are happy educational songs for children´s shows.