In 2018 I published Le fake news e il marketing del vero on Medium (The Abstract). The essay addressed a question that seemed, at the time, primarily a media and communication problem: how do false claims circulate, and why do people believe them?
Looking back, the essay was already asking a deeper question — one that would take eight years to formalize. Before you can assess whether a claim is true or false, you need to establish what kind of claim it is. A moral assertion, an empirical prediction, and a metaphysical statement are not evaluated by the same criteria. Conflating them is not just a logical error; it is the structural mechanism that makes manipulation possible.
This is the root of the framework I would later build. The problem of fake news turned out to be, at its core, an ontological problem disguised as an epistemological one.
The 2018 essay did not yet have a taxonomy. It did not have a coding manual, a validation protocol, or an API pipeline. But it had the question — and the question was the right one.