Who built
this factory?
I build tools that help my generation spot manipulation online.
Hi — I'm Nicholas. I'm 17, I play competitive basketball, and I'm an 11th-grade student at the Romanian-Finnish High School in Bucharest. Over the last few years I've also spent a lot of time in rooms where adults make decisions about young people: as a member of UNICEF Romania's Children's Board since 2023, and of the Children's Advisory Council of the Bucharest City Hall since 2024.
That's also where I kept running into the same problem. My generation lives online — and online is exactly where we get played. Scams, fake AI images, "loverboy" manipulation, ads built to trick us. So I did something about it: I wrote a digital-safety course for teenagers, designed to teach people my age how these traps actually work.
"I don't think you beat disinformation by telling people what's true. You beat it by showing them how the lie was made — so they catch it themselves."
That idea is the whole reason this site exists. Instead of another poster saying "think critically," I wanted to build something you could use — a factory where you assemble a lie with your own hands and walk away immune to it. It's based on a real method psychologists call prebunking, the same logic behind tools built by researchers at the University of Cambridge.
I care about this because I've seen what happens when young people aren't equipped — and because I believe my generation doesn't have to be the most fooled online. We can be the hardest to fool. That's what I'm trying to build, one tool at a time.